Occasionally the NY Times finds interesting news it deems fit to print.  Any time Stephen King writes something about the writing business, I read it.  I don’t like the guy’s stuff much, but I think his book On Writing should be read by every writer, new or established—it’s his most important opus.  The Times article by King, “Can a Novelist be too Prolific?” appearing in the Sunday Review section (8/30/15), is an important addendum.  Note the Times didn’t put it into their Book Review section or Business section, places that would make more sense.  But who said the Times editors know what they’re doing.

I quote from two paragraphs toward the end of the article: “As a young man, my head was like a crowded movie theater where someone has just yelled ‘Fire!’ and everyone is scrambling for the exits at once.  I had a thousand ideas but only 10 fingers and one typewriter.  There were days—I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating—when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane.”  “My thesis here is a modest one: that prolificacy is sometimes inevitable, and that it has its place.  The accepted definition of the word—‘producing much fruit, or foliage, or many offspring’—has an optimistic ring, at least to my ear.’

Readers and writers should read the whole article, of course.  King is trying to counter the perception that people who write many novels write schlock.  He says critics often have that perception.  I’m not so sure about readers.  (A lot of prolific writers I no longer read have become virtual schlock factories—many of them are Big Five authors.)  No matter.  If you replace the phrase “as a young man” with “as an old man,” King could be describing me.  People visiting this site and blog know I describe the situation differently.  Banshees with tasers AKA my muses are on my case because they know I’ve been collecting writing material all my life, and these tormenters now want me to keep spinning yarns to entertain readers.  I don’t know about approaching insanity, but that’s the situation.

An author’s degree of prolificacy depends on many factors.  Unlike King, I didn’t start publishing as a young man (discounting an unpublished novel written in the summer I turned thirteen).  While I spent many years collecting ideas, I was busy supporting a family (hard to do for most wannabe writers) and educating my kids, echoing my father’s life as a painter of landscapes and still-lifes.  One makes one’s choices—I always thought it would be hard to make a living as a writer (it is) and irresponsible of me to make my family share my suffering (my opinion).

I keep a running dialogue with my muses, though.  They’re happy to let me choose which ideas I turn into novels, novellas, or short stories, as long as I write most days.  I’ve even convinced them that writing these blog posts is part of my writing life now.  And I refuse to let them turn any of it into drudgery.  I only write a post or story if it means something to me—entertaining, yes, but also something profound that makes people think.  I don’t think it’s schlock for that reason, but who knows?  Like that young King, though, I feel compelled to write and put the prose on the page.

King presents both sides of the issue, giving many examples of schlock writers (he actually knocks the James Patterson factory).  He also talks about authors who aren’t or weren’t prolific.  I would add Truman Capote (who said Kerouac didn’t write, he typed) and Harper Lee to his list of non-prolific but good authors.  And that’s the other point.  Writers write at different speeds.  Ignoring many factors (plot, genre, time spent at the keyboard, etc.), I would expect book production to follow a normal distribution, so it’s not a surprise to see output running from one (Harper Lee’s “new book” is really just a rough draft of Mockingbird the original editor didn’t accept) to hundreds.  The important question is whether what they write is schlock or not.

I’ll return to that question in a moment.  I first want to pit the critics’ position on prolificacy against the common advice to writers about writing their next book.  Good writing is both a natural talent and an acquired skill.  I’ve never stopped learning, and writing the next book is always a new adventure in learning.  I recently rewrote The Midas Bomb, #1 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.”  I didn’t match Mr. King’s speed on one of his books and certainly couldn’t have participated in NaNoWriMo with it, but that first edition flowed rapidly onto the page as the characters practically took over the storytelling.  I call this being in the zone, and some of my best material occurs when this happens.  But the second edition is still a major improvement.   After writing many books in that series and many other books, I could apply the new things I’d learned.  Writing the next book is still good advice for an author, prolificacy accusations be damned.

But what makes schlock?  What makes great literature?  I’m sure the critics will come after me on this one, but they don’t have the answer to those questions.  No one does.  And most readers don’t give a rat’s ass about what critics say because they want to be entertained.  But clearly popular doesn’t correlate well with great—they’re rather independent qualities.  The Fifty Shades books were immensely popular, but they’re schlock.  The Harry Potter books were immensely popular too, but they’re neither schlock nor great literature.  I’d call Baldacci’s Wish You Well great; most of his other stuff, while popular, is schlock if my stuff is.  There are many books I’d call great literature that critics wouldn’t; there are many classics I wouldn’t call great literature, no matter what critics say.  I’m my own critic, just like every reader is his own critic.

Prolificacy doesn’t correlate well with schlockness or greatness.  It’s simply a measure of an author’s output, no more, no less.  My take is that an author with a great, entertaining story should put it out there.  Why not?  Readers, critics, and time will determine if it’s called great now or a hundred or thousand years from now, and whether it has legs or will be a flash-in-the-pan.  If an author can entertain a few readers in the here and now, s/he’s done her or his job.  ‘Nough said.

In elibris libertas….

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2015 at 4:00 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.