Quantity Over Quality Writing: The Pottery Class Proof
The famous pottery class experiment applies to poets more than anyone. A contest judge explains why writing fifty mediocre poems beats polishing one, and gives you a thirty-day plan.
A ceramics teacher once split a class in two. The left side would be graded on quantity: fifty pounds of pots earns an A, beauty irrelevant. The right side had to produce one perfect pot. The quantity group made every single one of the best pots, and the story, made famous by David Bayles and Ted Orland in Art and Fear, is the strongest case for quantity over quality writing I know. The perfection group spent the term theorizing about greatness and delivered almost nothing worth firing. I have judged poetry contests for years now, and the pottery class is not a parable to me. It is a scoring sheet I fill out every month. The poets who improve fastest are almost always the ones producing in bulk, and the rest of this piece is about why, and how to copy them.
The Pottery Class That Settled the Argument
Why did the quantity group win? Because they were learning from clay while the others were learning from theory. Every wobbly pot taught a hand something a lecture never could. The quantity potters made their mistakes early, cheaply, and often, and by week six their hands knew things their minds had not caught up to yet.
Poets resist this logic harder than any other kind of artist I know. A painter accepts that the first hundred canvases are tuition. A pianist accepts scales. But a poet writes four poems a year, polishes each one for months, and wonders why the polishing never seems to make the poem good. Here is the uncomfortable answer: you cannot polish skill into a poem. Skill comes from the poems you have already finished and abandoned, and if there are not many of those, there is not much skill to draw on.
You cannot revise your tenth poem well until you have written your fortieth.
Why Quantity Over Quality Writing Works for Poets
The phrase sounds like an excuse for sloppiness, so let me be precise about the mechanism. Quantity over quality writing works because of three things that only volume can buy you.
- Lowered stakes. When this poem is one of thirty this month, you can afford to take the strange risk in stanza two. When it is your only poem this season, you will play it safe, and safe poems score in the middle of every rubric I have ever used.
- Faster feedback loops. A poet who finishes a poem a week learns fifty-two lessons a year about endings alone. A poet who finishes four learns four.
- Selection. Nobody sees your whole notebook. Write thirty poems and submit the best two, and readers will call you a careful, deliberate writer. They are seeing your quality. You got there through quantity.
That third point deserves its own sentence: quantity is how professionals manufacture the appearance of quality. The poets you admire are not hitting a higher percentage than you. They are taking more swings and hiding the misses.
What I See on the Scoring Table
A few winters ago I scored a submission from a poet whose cover note said, with real pride, that she had spent eleven months on the poem. It was clean. Every comma had been argued over. And it was dead on the page, the way a room is dead when someone has vacuumed it for a party no one attends. The same month, a different poet sent something that was clearly poem twenty-something of a daily practice: a slightly ragged piece about her father's hearing aids whistling during grace at dinner. One image in it, the hearing aids singing back to the prayer like crickets, has stayed with me for years. The eleven-month poem placed nowhere. The ragged one took second.
The polished poem had been revised toward correctness. The prolific poet had written so much that she had stopped guarding herself, and the good strangeness got through. I see this pairing almost every month. Volume does not just improve craft. It wears down the self-consciousness that keeps your best material out of the poem.
The Fourteen Drafts Experiment
Here is what volume does inside a single subject. Suppose you want to write about your grandmother's kitchen. Draft one, from almost every poet, looks like this:
Your kitchen was always warm,
filled with the smell of bread and love,
a place where I felt safe.
That is not a bad person writing. That is a first attempt, and first attempts reach for the nearest shelf, which is stocked with warmth, bread, love, and safety. Now imagine the poet who writes fourteen small poems about that kitchen in fourteen days. By poem six the bread is gone because it has been used. By poem nine she is writing about the drawer of rubber bands saved from newspapers. By poem fourteen:
She saved rubber bands in the third drawer down,
each one a newspaper she had already argued with.
When she died we found four hundred of them,
still holding the shape of the news.
No poet gets to poem fourteen by revising poem one for a year. The rubber bands are only findable by someone who exhausted the bread. That is the entire argument, in one drawer.
The Thirty-Poem Month: A Plan You Can Start Tonight
Do not just nod at this. Run the experiment. Here is the structure I give poets who ask me how to actually do it.
- Set a count, not a standard. Thirty poems in thirty days, or fifteen if you are stretched thin. The only rule for each poem is that it ends. Length does not matter; a four-line poem counts. If you need a shape to keep things quick, the compression of a short form helps, and the haiku is a fine daily container.
- Forbid revision until the month ends. Revision during a quantity month is procrastination wearing a work apron. Finish, date it, turn the page.
- Use prompts to remove the blank page tax. Deciding what to write about costs more energy than writing. A running list of prompts about objects that outlive us or anything similar will do; the prompt is scaffolding, not subject.
- Track one craft element per week. Week one, endings. Week two, line breaks, and if you want a lens for that week, read up on enjambment and try to break one line against the grammar every day. Week three, verbs. Week four, first lines.
- On day thirty-one, harvest. Read all thirty in one sitting. Mark the three with a live pulse. Those are your revision candidates for the next month. Expect twenty-seven duds. Twenty-seven duds and three live poems is a spectacular month; most poets do not produce three live poems a year.
What Quantity Does Not Mean
Two clarifications, because this advice gets abused in both directions.
First, quantity does not mean publishing everything. The pottery students did not exhibit fifty pots. They exhibited the good ones. Your notebook is the kiln, not the gallery, and the discipline of selection is where quality actually shows up. Write in bulk, submit in miniature.
Second, quantity is a phase, not a religion. The thirty-poem month exists to build range and loosen your grip. Afterward comes real revision, slow and demanding, on the survivors. The mature version of this practice alternates: a month of volume, a month of pressure on the best three. Poets who only produce become fluent and shallow. Poets who only polish become careful and silent. The alternation is the craft.
Selection also gets sharper when someone scores your survivors against a rubric. Part of why I like judging is watching poets recalibrate once they see where a poem actually lands on creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme, which is the five-part breakdown every entrant gets when they submit to the monthly Writory contest. Send one harvest poem, keep the other twenty-nine private, and let the score tell you whether your selection instinct is honest.
The Good Poem Was Never the Point
Here is the thing the perfection group in that ceramics class never understood, and the thing I want to leave you holding. They believed the assignment was to make a great pot. It was not. The assignment was to become the kind of person whose hands make great pots, and there is no route to that person except through the fifty pounds of clay.
Your great poem works the same way. It is not waiting inside your current draft, extractable through enough careful sanding. It is waiting on the far side of a pile of finished, flawed, dated, abandoned poems, and every one of them moves you a week closer. Stop guarding the one pot. Go get your fifty pounds.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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