Quality and Quantity

I'm working on my novel a bit more but I find myself fleshing out the already written portions and avoiding the rest. Editing and re-editing sections that have been written is a dangerous thing. I'm finding myself falling into serious "like" with some of the writing, especially after a few passes with an editorial pen improves it.

However, each time I start writing on an unwritten section, I am afraid it won't be as good. Of course it won't! Each section goes through lots of editing and polishing. As ever, it's about quantity of writing. Quality comes from quantity (and lots of well-executed editing). My avoidance of writing out new sections is clearly becoming a problem because soon I'll have nothing but polished parts of the book and scrawled notes concerning the rest of it.

If you've never read the book Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland there is an illustration of the point about quantity and quality. They discuss a pottery class in which students' grades were based on one of two grading criteria. In order to get an "A" students either had to produce one perfect pot or they had to produce a large quantity of pots. Those aiming for perfect pots would begin many pots but complete very few, starting over when they found flaws. The other group simply focused on quantity. In the end, which group had the most perfect pots? The quantity group!

They say practice makes better (and sometimes, it can make perfect) and that's absolutely right. The more you write, the better your writing will be. As I find myself going along with the quality crowd on my writing projects, I know it's got to stop. So, for each section I polish, I need to write out a new section.