Prolific Writers

[ions]

Is it possible to be prolific, in the sense that you have tons published, and still be very good? Look at Steel, Clancy, Koontz, King. That's a lot of writing! What about the fantasy writers?! Do some of these people sleep? R.A. Salvatore! Have you seen all that he has published? I've heard the rumours that some of these writers have teams working for them. They just create plotlines and deligate. Problem is most of these human novel factories aren't very good. So I got wondering about the great writers. Can you be prolific and still churn out quality fiction or is there only so much that each person has?

The only really fruitful great I can think of off the top of my head is Dickens. He wrote a lot of great stuff. Shitty Dickens? Not likely. Not in my opinion anyway. Tolstoy wrote a few but not what you would call many, certainly less than Dickens. Dostoevsky published a few more than Tolstoy. Joyce? A handful. Steinbeck did a little more. Hemingway, about on par with Steinbeck. Of course not everything these authors published is very well exposed so some may have written a lot yet only had a few become popular. Anyway, who writes well and a lot today?

 

[leckert]

Asimov was/is also fairly prolific, and still usually pretty good. I'm not a huge fan of his (my brother is, though), but I have liked what I have read.

I think the prolific writers (like King and Koontz) become victims of their own success. Once they have a track record, their publishers will print anything with their name on it. With no one to critique their work but themselves, and increasing pressure to produce, I think they get focused more on quantity than quality. A publisher knows that he will make more money on five mediocre or even bad novels by a popular author than on one great novel by an unknown.

I always thought you could tell how much money a publisher was making on a particular writer by the size of the author's name relative to the size of the book's title on the dust jacket!

 

[Doug Johnson]

Shakespeare cranked out a lot of work. I think most of it was pretty good.

 

[SFG75]

I remember that Mark Twain ranked pretty high in terms of churning out published works. In the academic world, I can't keep pace with Noam Chomsky or Robert Coles to save my life.

 

[Billy]

I realise that you are probably talking more about fiction, but for non-fiction, A.J.P Taylor was indeed a prolific writer and I have liked everything I've read by him, although he is writing history not novels.

 

[ions]

Doesn't Noam Chomsky have a lot of lectures published? Isn't that cheating?