Time is my Friend

The quantity versus quality debate has probably been going since one cave person spent half  a lifetime (after the Day Job of hunting mastodons or gathering tubers) scrunched up in backbreaking positions whilst painstakingly painting a complicated paleolithic scene replete with herds of local wildlife portrayed in loving detail while another prehistoric visual artist, overcome by inspiration, seized the moment and wildly smacked a pigment-dipped hand countless times against a rock face and then demanded equal respect for that quickie. Time is the distinguishing factor here, and the ongoing debate reflects how we evaluate its importance in the creative process. Can fast be good? Is slow necessarily better? Might the slapdash artist have benefited from taking a few moments to consider composition and colour? Might the meticulous one have heightened the dynamics of the animal subjects by loosening up a bit?

Over at the SFWA blog, there's a post by Marcis Yudkin on the perennial time as an added value topic :

http://www.sfwa.org/2012/07/guest-blog-post-in-praise-of-ripening-4/#more-25449.

She's not taking a swipe at the self-publishing industry, or damning ebooks to a special circle of Hell, but questions the way these modern developments often spin an attitude that promotes churning inferior word-stuff through the system as an admirable thing, and actually encourages would-be writers to not worry about ripping off readers with hastily written, bad quality prose because the product is so cheap. Often the message is that you don't need to waste your time agonising over your work to make money from writing. Quality craftsmanship is for chumps. Content can be copied. As per usual in these shallow days, it's all about the packaging. 

 Me, I'm an old-fashioned girl with a mostly non-linear approach to the physics of writing time. I too can, in a fit of inspiration, slap my hand against a cave wall to produce the occasional fast piece, and I still consider those to be well-worked stories in their own right, but mostly I write, put aside, write, put aside, write, and finally finish my tales, sometimes years later. I actually enjoy letting the bigger stories mature. Years can add layers to a first draft that only a few geniuses can achieve straight off the bat. I wouldn't mind being a faster writer, not at all, and I'd love more than anything to be be paid properly for my work and to make enough money from writing to be able to do it full time. I do believe in having a realistic and professional approach to the business of fiction writing, but fast or slow, mainstream or genre, literary or pulp, I also believe one's work has to be motivated by a real love of words, stories, characters and ideas, include a willingness to let tales unfold at their own pace, and incorporate a genuine enjoyment of the process. If there's no love of bringing unruly elements together and racking your brain for a way to make them gel, just a preference for following easy tick-the-character-and-plot-boxes developed by marketers, then it isn't writing as I know it. If there's no artistic component to it, a story is just another mass-produced product. If there's no understanding that no matter how disciplined you might be, you can't always force creativity to abide by imposed time strictures, then you should invest your energy in a more regulated, punch-in-and-out-according-to-a-roster office job to avoid frustration.

Possibly this is an unrealistic attitude that dooms me to a life of writerly poverty. So be it. Now, it's time to get on with that story about...