Quality V Quantity?

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It's day three of NaNoWriMo and I've written over 11,000 words already. I'm curious about how some of the other challengers are doing, because the few whose word counts I've seen are currently far lower than mine.

I'm genuinely not sure whether to be concerned, uplifted or neither. 

On the uplifted side, I'm working on a story that's been growing in my head for a few years, I spent October developing characters and planning scenes, so when I sit down to write I pretty much know what I need to write. I've spoken with some challengers who haven't even settled properly on a story yet and another who spent one writing evening thinking what to write. Her total output that session was three words.

On the concerned side, I'm very aware that anyone can hammer out words at a keyboard and as the post title suggests, there's often a trade-off between quality and quantity. I used to have a supervisor at work who was incompetent and a borderline bully. I often had to try to explain to her that I could do something quick or I could do something well, but she had to pick. Of course the bitch said, "both," more often than not, but I think most reasonable people get the point.

So am I storming ahead, throwing out poor-quality scenes, patchy dialogue and inaccurate, irrelevant descriptions, or have I suddenly become an excellent writer, capable of turning out thousands of words a day and a novel every other month or so?

I'm hopeful that it's not the former and positive it's not the latter. I think it's somewhere in between. I think that decades of reading and years of trying to write creatively have given me at least some idea of the difference between good writing and bad writing, but I'm also acutely aware that I have a lot less experience in so many areas that some of the other challengers. I've only created a few characters and know very little about how to create a well-motivated, appropriately-flawed character, I'm very much a 'pantser' when it comes to character development. I'm also not very informed when it comes to style and genre. I started writing a post about that yesterday but ended up writing about a novel I've started reading instead. When I'm writing I'm not thinking about whether what I've written fits inside the confines of a particular style or a given genre.

So I've got a few advantages over some of the other challengers. I've had a lot more time than I might otherwise have had (thanks to a period of sick absence from work, which ends next Wednesday) and I'm not bound by the conventions of style or genre. I've heard the phrase, 'speculative fiction' as a genre and I have no idea what that is. I've read that one author writes about 'the human condition' and I've never heard of that either. If I had to examine my writing every few minutes to assess whether I'd stray across a genre line or a style boundary, I'm sure I wouldn't have anywhere near as many words down as I do.

All in all, my conclusion is that there is definitely a trade-off in my work between quality and quantity, but I don't think it means my writing is bad. It's probably not excellent, not yet at least, but I think I'm doing okay.


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