The Winning Formula for Writing Success

Posted: February 28, 2012

[caption id="attachment_9834" align="alignright" width="346"]© michelangelus - Fotolia.com[/caption]When I wrote the heading for today’s post, I thought to myself, “I should be making infomercials and workshop presentations, offering my ‘secret’ for a thousand dollars.” A thousand dollars a head for even a few dozen participants? That’s what I call successful writing: With one phrase and a few platitudes, I could take a couple of years off from work.

Nah. I’ll give it to you free of chargel

Quality requires quantity.

Yes? And?

That’s it. Quality requires quantity.

Oh, all right. I’ll expound.

That’s a layered statement, one that’s as deep as you want to dive. But on its most basic level, it means that an output of high quality must be preceded by an input of high quantity. In other words, a return of quality takes an investment of quantity.

The new publishing model is that, thanks to the Internet, everyone’s a writer. That’s the good news. But it’s also the bad news, because it means that because many writers in this suddenly expanded universe are not highly qualified, the universe is degraded. There have always been less-than-stellar writers, but it was more difficult for them to publish their work and sustain success.

Now, however, nonprofessional writers can be forgiven for believing that because it’s easy to type, it’s easy to write. And the remaining exemplars of great writing are lost in the leveling of the signal-to-noise ratio — if they are sought out at all anymore.

The brave new world of formal publishing is also degraded, in this case by a business model that no longer values quality — because remember, quality requires quantity (and quantity, of course, requires financial investment). So now, I can find six typographical errors stuffed into a twenty-word caption in the website for a major metropolitan newspaper (since corrected because, hey, it’s the instant Internet, and we can always fix it later!), and I can find my enjoyment of a newly published book compromised by shoddy editing (improvement of which must wait for the second edition, if there is one, and if there is the wherewithal to improve it — but that’s too late for me).

Read the complete articleThe Winning Formula for Writing Success.

Biz Tip Provided by DailyWritingTips

Written by Mark Nichol