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| Hearsay: |
Are prolific authors necessarily better or worse? You think JCO is prolific? Try some of the people mentioned in this article, with near 1000 books in a lifetime. What drives them to do it?
Ultimately, we know that all writers do what they can and what they must. Truly extreme productiveness (like its opposite) is beyond the absolute control of the author. For the rest of us, the respectably rather than the manically productive, there are more practical explanations. Partly it’s the freelancer’s conundrum. Anthony Burgess (75 or so books in some 40 years) used to say he never turned down any reasonable offer of work, and very few unreasonable ones. This will be written on many of our graves.
But perhaps the real reason we keep writing is the hope, naïve perhaps, that we’ll make a better job of it next time. Unless you’re a genius or a fool, you realize that everything you write, however “successful,” is always a sort of failure. And so you try again.
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February 23rd, 2009 at 10:57 am
I remember reading somewhere that suggested that Flaubert and Henry James’ attitude that each and every work required a sort of painful birthing process gave literary authors an excuse to slow their output. Works of literary merit became ‘difficult’ to produce, requiring years of effort and refining. It was no longer serious art to produce a book a year, or a book every six months, or what have you. I don’t necessarily agree with either view point – do we really want Trollope’s famous stop watch method of writing? – but I can see the influence of Flaubert at least in the difficult masterpiece vein of writing.
Think about it this way. John Updike, who died recently, will likely be remembered for his Rabbit books, his short stories, and his criticism. I would be incredibly surprised if his other novels received any sort of sustained critical appreciation. But are we less for him having written them? It’s impossible to say that five mediocre books means one less Rabbit book, so why try? The works made the author, and the author was, in Updike’s case, phenomenal, so take the masterpieces along with the mediocre and be happy that we had them at all.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Neither necessarily better or worse. People write in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons & in different circumstances.