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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47332
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

For many years --decades actually --my goal with _every_ piece of writing I wrote was that it be read and appreciated by someone. There were plenty of things I wrote that didn't achieve that goal, and ended up moldering away in some corner of my hard-drive, but I viewed those projects as _failures_. **I write to connect with other people** , and anything that doesn't do that isn't worth the effort --or so I thought.

Ironically, it was my day job as a programmer that taught me differently. Often, as a programmer, you can spend months of work coding something that never goes into production. Surprisingly, that never bothered me that much --because I viewed every project as a learning project. Whether or not the code was used, it taught me new things about how to be a better programmer. **The same applies to writing.** Every word you write potentially teaches you to be a better writer --if you approach it as someone ready to learn. And you can't be a good writer without going through all those pages of writing first. Writing projects that are never read _aren't failures_. They're learning opportunities. The only failed projects are the ones that you don't learn anything from.

I'm a late convert to worldbuilding, and [the Iceberg Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_theory), which states that we must know far more about the world of our story than we put on the page (and like many late converts, I've been evangelical about it recently!) but I do think this goes even beyond the richness of story that can result from doing plenty of extra research and worldbuilding before writing. The writing you do doesn't necessarily have to be backstory, or even be directed towards a certain project in order for it to be worthwhile. The practice of good writing --and the process of becoming a better writer --is a worthy goal in of itself. And **it's a mistake to think you can get to the good writing by avoiding the bad writing**. [Quantity leads to quality](https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramics-class-and-quantity-before-quality/).

Original score: 46