Quantity vs Quality
Hello!
I’m Hari Kanth, and this is my weekly newsletter about my adventures in trying to become a comedy writer-director.
Quantity vs Quality
I’m a growing fan of the idea that quantity is more important than quality.
It’s an idea that I’ve come across before, but I was reminded of it while watching this interview with Gary Vaynerchuk, about how Netflix are releasing a new movie every week this year:
> I think that in Hollywood, and in general in creative land, we demonise quantity. We’re like: what about quality? Well, quality is subjective. You either like it or you don’t. But quantity is not subjective. So while Netflix puts out all these movies and their competitors put out far less, it gives Netflix many more bats to hit the home run that let’s say The Queen’s Gambit was.
I’ve seen evidence for this subjectivity while tweeting. I try to tweet a joke every weekday — both to get better at joke writing, but also to remind people that I exist. (Hello! 👋🏾)
There are some jokes that I’m really proud of, which get barely any response (5 likes):
Me: I’m introverted, so I like silence!
— Hari Kanth (@harihkanth) February 10, 2021
Friend: *awkward silence*
Me: no, not that kind
While there are some jokes that sit in my notes for weeks, because I don’t think they’re good enough, which end up doing way better than I expected (18 likes):
There are sufficiently few different types of ‘rocher’ that we probably don’t need to keep specifying ‘Ferrero’ each time.
— Hari Kanth (@harihkanth) January 5, 2021
(Plus: looking up those examples has made me realise that there’s such a small difference between tweets I perceive as “doing well” and tweets I perceive as “doing badly” – just 13 likes at the time of writing – that I now feel silly for caring about how well they go down at all.)
There are other advantages to focusing on quantity too:
- It reduces the pressure on each individual thing to be good.
- It creates the space for experimentation, and for weirder, more original ideas.
- It’s a natural path to quality anyway, because you get to practice more.
But while it’s easy to have this attitude for tweets and blog posts, I’ve found it harder to internalise it for larger projects like short films and sitcom pilots. Not only do they take way more effort, but I have ridiculously higher expectations for them — each one has to be the project that finally gets me noticed and helps me break through, in order to push up my graph of success.
But really, they’re no different to tweets: the outcome is out of my hands.
So this year, I’m going to try focusing on quantity only, and write three new pilots by the end of December. They might all be terrible — but at least I know that’s not my call to make.
Three Things
Here are three things I’ve enjoyed this week:
Watching: Late Night on Netflix. As a comedy writer, I love watching things about comedy writing — see 30 Rock or even Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip — and this film written by Mindy Kaling is a fun addition to the list. (It maybe suffers a little from the same comedy problem as Studio 60, but I thought it was an enjoyable watch.)
Reading: 1, 2, 7, 14 by Scott Myers. Since I’ve been thinking about quantity, I revisited this article about writing process. The numbers represent things to do every week: read one script; watch two movies; write seven pages for your current script; spend fourteen hours prepping story for your next script. I’m still in the ‘prep’ stage for my current pilot, but once that’s done, I want to try getting to this workflow as soon as I can (but with sitcom pilots instead of movies).
Learning: Stage 32 + Netflix Present: Television Pitch Workshop. Oh man, this is so, so good. Even if you’re not planning on pitching to Netflix anytime soon, it’s filled with gold on how to make sure your idea is as strong as possible before you start writing. If you don’t want to sit through all three hours, I’m going to summarise it for next week’s blog post.
How do you feel about quantity? (Maybe you’ve internalised all of this already, in which case do you have any useful mindset hacks you can share?) Reply to this email and let me know!
Until next time,
Hari.