Write Better, Not Just Faster

Man, I just don't know about this.  Belinda Frisch linked to this post at WORST BOOK EVER, and while I think they may have a point, I just can't agree with the conclusions they draw from it:

Write faster, no more laying around or drinking coffee to be happy with one book a year. You need to do 2-6 books a year at least. Now, if you keep up with your hungry fans you stand to make a great living. We are no longer in the time of the easy writers life. So, if you have a short story sitting around… Publish it! If you wrote a story in high school… Publish it! Content, content, content! Back list, out of print, old works… anything and everything just get it up and for sale, you never know what book will take off and lead the change for all your other works.

— THE WORST BOOK EVER!: WRITE FASTER!

Now, I certainly agree that it seems to be best for an indie writer to have as many books in "print" as possible, but . . . . I somehow just don't think that means that every single one of your unpublished trunk stories necessarily needs to see the light of day.  I mean, come on — a story you wrote in high school? Seriously? Okay, maybe you were turning out professional-quality writing when you were a teenager, but I know I sure as hell wasn't.

You can't just shove everything out there regardless of quality hoping that some of it will magically find an audience.  If you're looking to publish something that's been languishing on your hard drive for years, take a good long look at it first, and ask yourself if this, this right here, is really the piece of fiction you'd want a new reader to associate with your name.

This is much on my mind lately, because at Norwescon last weekend, I ran into an old friend of mine who asked me when I was going to self-publish Scratcher, which was my first horror novel.  She looked at me with wide-eyed shock when I told her I probably wasn't.  I'm glad to hear that she still thinks of it so fondly, but — I'm just not sure I feel like it's up to my current standards.  And I think having standards to apply to your own work is important, if you want to build an audience over time.  If editors and agents aren't the gatekeepers of quality anymore, we have to be our own gatekeepers.

I may still dust off Scratcher and take that good long look at it.  But I strongly suspect that at the end of the day, I'm going to quietly put it back where I left it, and move on to something better.