In his 274th issue of Very Good Copy, Eddie Shleyner tells the story of a professor who divided his class into two groups while they learned how to write vignettes . The first group was graded solely on the quality of their last vignette submission while the second group was graded solely on the quantity of their submissions. Some students questioned the fairness of this dual standard since it seemed that vignettes, being a form of art, should be judged by quality rather than quantity. "Anyone can write a bunch of crappy paragraphs," they pointed out. But the professor replied that, after many years of teaching, he had noticed,
"The people with the highest quantity of submissions always produce the highest quality of work too."
There's a commonly debated question among writers and really creatives of any kind: "Which matters more: the quantity or quality of your work? After thinking about this for a while, I believe the answer lies in the middle. When we're learning something new, we practice until we've learned it. Put another way, "Practice makes perfect." It doesn't even have to be perfect practice -- just practice.