I remember as an Eng Lit undergrad hearing a lecturer dismiss Wordsworth airily as a poet who ‘lived too long and wrote too much.’ Bit harsh, I thought. Just because he didn’t die tragically like the James Deans of the day, Byron and Shelley. And yes, OK, some of Wordsworth’s stuff is pretty mediocre, but would he have written ‘Sonnet on Westminster Bridge’ or ‘Intimations of Immortality’ if he hadn’t been churning out the mediocre stuff too?
Rebecca Evans of WriteTrack, the productivity tool for writers, is firmly of the opinion that more is more. When I asked her in this week’s Extraordinary Business Book Club episode for her one best bit of advice for would-be authors, this was it:
“Be prolific. We often think of being prolific as a bit of a dirty word but fundamentally the more you write the better you get. If you apply that in a deliberate way and learn from it you will become a better writer. It’s about be prolific in your volume, be prolific in writing in your habit, writing every single day, and having lots and lots of ideas. You really don’t know which of your ideas are going to work until you’ve got to put them out into the world.”
When I started blogging every day I discovered a great freedom in it – when it’s little and often, there’s not the same pressure to create something monumentally good. It’s easier just to start writing, knowing that if each time you sit to write it’s another step on the journey.
The important thing is, as the great man himself said (proving that he COULD get to the point when necessary):
“To begin, begin.”