Does Size Matter?

My friend Stephen made an interesting comment about yesterday's post. He referred to my daily word quota of 2000 as "effing insane." Funny thing is, I thought the same thing when AJ told me he wrote three chapters on Friday and was gunning for four on Saturday. Which, in my experience, equals one hell of a lot more than 2000 words.

I actually thought AJ was lying, but if Stephen is as floored by my output as I am by AJ's, I kind of think we all might be telling the truth. Which brings up the issue of Quantity vs. Quality.

If a person wrote one brilliant sentence and called it a day – as opposed to ten pages of absolute crap – would that would suffice? Keep in mind, I'm talking about first drafts, not polished, published works, when quality absolutely matters, whether the book is two pages or two hundred.

Personally, I subscribe to the school of Shitty First Drafts, an approach borrowed from the hilarious and wonderful Anne Lamott. The basic method is to bash out a whole bunch of words that are hopefully aimed in the general direction of the book/screenplay/haiku you want to write and then, after the bulk of the projectile word vomiting is done, go back and start making sense of it all.

I do hope Stephen will post another comment and tell us about his process. AJ too. And any other artist, writer, creative types out there. Or even carpenters, mechanics and undertakers – because everybody has a process. And because now I'm really intrigued.

Two thousand words, when I'm really cooking, takes me about two hours. I believe this pace comes from working at a magazine where a deadline was always looming like the blade of a guillotine and cranking out passable prose in five minutes or less became necessary for survival.

The thing about my puke-it-out-then-clean-it-up process is that re-drafting becomes excruciating. And I'm wondering if a more considered (a.k.a. slow, thoughtful) approach might serve me better. So that when I arrive to the second draft stage, I am not trying to pick apart the carnage of a five car pileup in order to make sense of things.

Especially if that pileup includes a semi-truck transporting chickens with avian influenza and there's feathers and strange snotty emissions (or whatever happens with bird flu) splattered everywhere and they need to bring in the Infections Diseases crew in biohazard suits and quarantine the whole area, shutting down the highway and backing up traffic for miles.

I'm sorry. Where was I?

Process. Word count. Right. My question to you, elegant and intelligent readers, is this: Is it more important to think about quality in a first draft or quantity (as in 'get the story out of my head as quickly as possible')?