It's been a few days since I started with 100 Days of Writing, having a hard time with it but that's not something unexpected. What I want to talk about today is being a quality writer vs a quantity writer or similarly being a good writer vs a bad writer.
Preface
I read this article about the difference between good and bad writers.
Good writers practice. They take time to write, crafting and editing a piece until it's just right. They spend hours and days, just revising.
Good writers spend time, a lot of time on thinking what to write on, writing a first draft of it, accepting that the first draft is horrendous but continuing to edit it "until it's just right".
Am I a bad writer?
Of course, no doubt.
Do I want to be better at it?
Yep.
Then why do I force myself to write something everyday, something that's so full of spelling and gramatical mistakes, something that has really long and hard to understand sentences when I can spend more time per article? Because I want to change.
This isn't going to be motivational in any way. But from my perspective, getting from a person who doesn't write to someone who writes beautifully is way harder than changing from a quantity writer to a quality writer.
Quality is hard to manage when you have to write something everyday, but so is quantity. The above article says this about bad writers:
Bad writers don't understand this, which is precisely what makes them bad writers. They presume their writing has achieved a certain level of excellence, so they are often closed off to editing or rewriting. They can seem haughty, prideful, and arrogant.
I don't know anyone who does that, this seems more of an ego issue that has translated to the habit of writing.
Who are the bad writers then?
Effort can be shown in multitude of ways and in almost everything you do. Who is a bad writer depends on what they write for and for whow?
If you write to teach people a concept, go the extra effort and make it as understandable as possible.
If you write to calm your mind, write regularly and write till your heart's content.
The one who has stopped putting the effort they used to, are bad writers. But there's no necessity of dividing every writer into groups.
You don't have to use big words that no one uses in daily life to be a good writer, just write like you talk. But that doesn't mean you should stop going the extra effort to organize and form you thoughts before writing. You should bother learning the "rules" for "good" writing:
A good written piece has to convey the ideas of the writer to a reader fully. Writing that doesn’t do that is equivalent of expressing love to your lover in a language she/he doesn’t understand.
That's all. By the way, I resonated a lot with this article, the mention of how everyone used to be divided into being "math kids" and "english kids" in schools was nostalgic.