Steady Drops July 1, 2022 As I mentioned in my last post, I've been re-evaluating some of my previous writing habits, especially measuring my writing progress by sheer word count alone. My thoughts had been that I could write a large mass of words in a throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall sort of way, and then edit that mass down into tighter, more polished words in revision. Now, I'm not sure if that was the best way to go. I'm not knocking free writing or writing to discovery, or any of the methods we writers use to work our way into a piece. At one time or another, I've used all of the above techniques, and no less an authority than John McPhee (in his famous essay Draft No. 4[1]) describes a similar method of getting started by writing a letter about what you can't write about, then simply erasing the first part of the letter once you get going. I guess what I'm reconsidering, then, is the importance of the quality of the initial writing, and if a smaller daily volume of well-written words which require little revision ends up being a better way to write than a larger, amorphous mass which requires more extensive reworking to be usable. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'll be spending less time writing than I did before. Even with a reduced word count, well-crafted words will likely take just as much--if not more--time to produce than my previous, larger goal. In a>Paris Review[2] interview, McPhee talks about spending all day in preparation for just two hours of concentrated writing. And if I'm changing my mind a bit on quantity versus quality of first-draft words, I'm not changing my opinion about writing regularly (daily if possible). In the same Paris Review article, McPhee says that he writes six days a week. "And the routine...puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it." Here's to buckets filled, drop-by-drop, with well-written words. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4 [2] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5997/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-3-john-mcphee (c) 2022 Andrew Gudgel email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com