This post from Zen Habits reminds me of a creative writing class I took a while back. The required reading was a set of well known authors. We would read and discuss a selection each week. These readings were our models for how we should structure our writing.
Some of my classmates would get frustrated that they could not produce the same level of quality as these authors. To this the teacher replied,
“Out of the 1000’s of pages, literally decades of writing, this author gets 4 pages in a collection. How much have you written?”
Words that ring so true. It’s about doing not about polishing your single master piece. I find the more I practice, the better I get. It’s simple really. A lot of my practice stuff never makes it to the blog or the book or the proposal but it leads me to the good stuff. Without the volumes of mediocre prose, I could never attempt to craft a great sentence or two.
