If you write more will you write better?

“Nine out of ten writers, I am sure, could write more. I think they should and, if they did, they would find their work improving even beyond their own, their agent’s, and their editor’s highest hopes.” - John Creasey

Is that right? Could that possibly be right? If you really just kept putting one word after the other, would you really improve dramatically? No question, all of us who want to get better need to write much much more than we do, but can you really transform your literary efficacy by dint of sheer volume?

John Creasey wrote 565 books before he died in 1973 (I have not read any of them). We just don’t live in an age when people write 600′ish books anymore. The market couldn’t possibly bear that from one writer today, anyway. Though, I don’t really understand how it ever could from writers in the past, either.

Here’s the question about volume for me: when does re-writing end and new writing begin? I suppose it’s easy if you’re a writer with a career going. You’ve rewritten it enough when your publisher says “this is good; I will buy it.” What if you’re trying to become a writer and trying to get better, though?

I know young writers who get paralyzed by the need to make every paragraph precisely right. Their productivity is very low. In Creasey’s analysis, they are not getting better. My productivity is pretty high, but I often suspect that I don’t re-write nearly enough.

How do you know when one work is really finished and ready to go so that you can begin the next one? And will you really get so much better if you err on the side of done and just keep beginning and beginning and beginning until you’ve written more and more and more? Is that the path to real literary virtuosity?