Go read Tobias Buckell’s blog post on Pigeons and Pel­lets, then come on back here.

It’s a great piece that makes an impor­tant point about why we write and how we can moti­vate our­selves to keep going. It’s so great that I want to add to it.

The bottom line of Toby’s argu­ment is that writers (like lab ani­mals) are moti­vated by rewards that come in the form of praise, high sales, good reviews, etc … but are essen­tially pow­er­less to con­trol these ele­ments beyond the effort they put into writing.

He’s absolutely right. You want to give your writing career the best chance to take off? Toby advises you to, “write more.”

Let me put a dif­ferent spin on that. Don’t write more, write better.

I know authors who eek out a living with over 10 novels in print on major imprints. And I know writers who are multi-millionaires based on the profits of a single book. I believe that the dif­fer­ence lies in per­fec­tionism. The old adage is that the def­i­n­i­tion of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting a dif­ferent result. There’s some­thing to that. Just pro­ducing isn’t enough. It’s a part of it, but not the most impor­tant part.

In your effort to secure the Buck­el­lian pellet, I feel that your time is far better invested in devel­oping your craft, then it is in merely churning out mate­rial. An hour spent reading the work of a master and trying to under­stand why what he/she does is working, will go far­ther than an hour spent churning out prose that only equals the quality of your pre­vious output.

Toby’s right that, in the end, the writing is the only thing we can really con­trol, and I’d submit that it’s the quality far beyond the quan­tity that counts. Writers absolutely can and do have long careers based on striking a vein and mining it, but I’m an advo­cate for swinging for the bleachers. There are a few block­busters that leave me scratching my head, but by and large hugely suc­cessful books are that way for a reason and that reason is usu­ally that the writer took their time and didn’t settle for any­thing less than per­fec­tion. There are happy acci­dents in the world (and in lit­er­a­ture more than most other arenas), but by and large I believe that suc­cess isn’t a random thing. You have to forge it, patiently and thor­oughly, no matter what pres­sures you may be under.