Have you ever heard a Writer or Poet or maybe a Teacher say something about the volume of another author’s work and perhaps mention the lack of their own works in the same sentence? You know it’s the Quality vs Quantity argument. And of course it does make sense in most everything. However, if you are living your life as a Writer or Poet along the lines of say Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” where you cannot live pretty much if you cannot write, then are you not writing most every day anyway? And if you are writing every day, what are you doing with your works?
For a long time, years probably, I ran a few of my own zines and such and I would have a few things published here or there. I would write mostly on the weekends. Later on, I shifted to writing most evenings and on Saturdays, sometimes on Sundays. I feel better if I write, and I do have something to say and loads of ideas. It depends, though, how often and how much I write at a time.
When I started getting into place poetry, I wrote quite a few chapbooks of poems. The poems simply flowed. I write more poems than fiction. I write non-fiction, too. I do take time to Edit and Revise most everything multiple times. Sometimes, my works sit for years before I actually do anything with them beyond editing. So as it stands, once I achieved a level of writing I was comfortable with I began to get more and more things published, without submitting as much. (I did go to Graduate school for Theater & Playwriting, Speech, and Communications.)
I do write to be read. I don’t write to take the work and leave it hidden on my computer. I can do that with my journaling if that’s what I choose to do.
So if you are any of the words bandied about so often and not necessarily in a nice way: well-published and/or prolific, does that make you any less of a Writer or Poet than someone who maybe writes one story a year, one or two poems a year, and so on? It can go the same way in reverse, are you any less of a Writer or Poet because you don’t write very much or it takes you a long time to complete something?
Walt Whitman kept on writing on his book “Leaves of Grass” adding and adding to it until he could not. You can read it in the Deathbed edition. It took me two years to read it all.
How you write is up to you. How much you write is also up to you. If you want to share said writings with the world, also up to you.
My thinking is this: Write Without Ceasing! It is the writer’s way. (You can find a home later for your work, if you so choose!)
