and I guess some of my discomfort with the claim that prolificness is inherent to an author is this: how can you tell the difference (or is there much of a difference) between someone who's "naturally" a slower writer, and someone who's futilely "waiting for inspiration" when they should be actually working, like Tchaikovsky suggests?
I mean, with a few exceptions, mot of the authors that anyone cares about wrote a lot. A lot a lot. Maybe most the shit they wrote sucked, maybe most of it never got published, but they still put in however many hundreds of hours it took to end up writing not-sucky stuff. (I mention To Kill a Mockingbird as an exception in the original post, but it might be worth nothing that I suspect is more mawkish southern sentimentality than actual "great literature" or whatnot.)
I mean, no one looks at engineers and thinks they're naturally non-prolific. I guess some may be slower or more methodical than others, but most can produce reasonable products of their engineering on a fairly regular basis...
...and of course, engineering and writing are very different things, but in this case I suspect they may be more similar than alike.
so like tl;dr I feel like there's a fuzzy line between "I have a slower creative output than other writers" and "I could and should be writing more, but I'm not," which it occurs to me now is not a terribly novel thing to be saying, oops.
(and actually, another vague suspicion that occurred to me when writing this post: maybe an author's "natural" output is much more a function of environmental factors—like, in my own extremely limited experience, I've noticed my periods of highest creative output occurred when I had the "right" balance of free time and work—too much work and my brain fries; too much free time and I turn into a slug—so what seems to be inherent to an author is really more of the circumstances an author is in at a given time—which aren't always changeable, but which also don't suggest some inherent limit on an author's output based on the nature of their talent.)
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Date: 2012-09-11 04:56 am (UTC)and I guess some of my discomfort with the claim that prolificness is inherent to an author is this: how can you tell the difference (or is there much of a difference) between someone who's "naturally" a slower writer, and someone who's futilely "waiting for inspiration" when they should be actually working, like Tchaikovsky suggests?
I mean, with a few exceptions, mot of the authors that anyone cares about wrote a lot. A lot a lot. Maybe most the shit they wrote sucked, maybe most of it never got published, but they still put in however many hundreds of hours it took to end up writing not-sucky stuff. (I mention To Kill a Mockingbird as an exception in the original post, but it might be worth nothing that I suspect is more mawkish southern sentimentality than actual "great literature" or whatnot.)
I mean, no one looks at engineers and thinks they're naturally non-prolific. I guess some may be slower or more methodical than others, but most can produce reasonable products of their engineering on a fairly regular basis...
...and of course, engineering and writing are very different things, but in this case I suspect they may be more similar than alike.
so like tl;dr I feel like there's a fuzzy line between "I have a slower creative output than other writers" and "I could and should be writing more, but I'm not," which it occurs to me now is not a terribly novel thing to be saying, oops.
(and actually, another vague suspicion that occurred to me when writing this post: maybe an author's "natural" output is much more a function of environmental factors—like, in my own extremely limited experience, I've noticed my periods of highest creative output occurred when I had the "right" balance of free time and work—too much work and my brain fries; too much free time and I turn into a slug—so what seems to be inherent to an author is really more of the circumstances an author is in at a given time—which aren't always changeable, but which also don't suggest some inherent limit on an author's output based on the nature of their talent.)