My father pointed me to this parable (apparently the actual experiment was about photography, but the originator of putting the parable out there changed it to ceramics):
There’s a famous business-book parable about “quantity leading to quality”: in a ceramics class, one group of students get told they’ll be graded on how good their very best pot is, and another group are told they’ll be graded simply on how many pots they made, without even checking their quality.
At the end of the experiment, of course, the “quantity” group had made much better pots – because they’d been working and practicing every day, so we’re told – while the “quality” group didn’t even make one good pot, because their perfectionism had stopped them getting their hands dirty and learning as they went.
This could easily be told of writing. Certainly I’ve run across many students who are so concerned about getting it right/perfect that they are stuck frozen and unable to complete their writing. It fits in with the notion of 10,000 hours to master something. Clearly you need to worry about quality along the way (editing stage for writing), but it’s important not to let that keep you from that initial stage of getting words on the page to play with and polish.
Ramblings 