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The Importance of Being Prolific
Once again, Hacker News is discussing an oddly artsy article: The Importance of Being Prolific, which discusses the differences between prolific and non-prolific artists in various mediums (filmakers, novelists, etc). Pretty good read.
Some random related thoughts: while it's certainly not unheard of for a famous writer to publish only one or two books in their lifetime (To Kill a Mockingbird is the canonical example, but there's also Wuthering Heights and Invisible Man), as far as I know this is not the case for visual art—for a visual artist to be considered famous/well-regarded, they almost always need to have a large body of work. Part of this is probably due to the nature of the mediums—a piece of art is quicker to digest than a whole novel—but I still find this rather interesting.
Also, it's interesting to consider how the age of an artist factors into their work. I'm mainly thinking of music here—when you look at the romantic era of music, all the famous composers either (a) died young, or (b) produced their best work while they were young. (I remember when my piano teacher first told me this, I didn't believe her, so I went home and looked up all my favorite romantic composers—and, yup, nearly all of 'em kicked the bucket early.) Other eras of music have favored older composers, but it seems youthfulness was inextricably linked to the sound of romanticism.
Some random related thoughts: while it's certainly not unheard of for a famous writer to publish only one or two books in their lifetime (To Kill a Mockingbird is the canonical example, but there's also Wuthering Heights and Invisible Man), as far as I know this is not the case for visual art—for a visual artist to be considered famous/well-regarded, they almost always need to have a large body of work. Part of this is probably due to the nature of the mediums—a piece of art is quicker to digest than a whole novel—but I still find this rather interesting.
Also, it's interesting to consider how the age of an artist factors into their work. I'm mainly thinking of music here—when you look at the romantic era of music, all the famous composers either (a) died young, or (b) produced their best work while they were young. (I remember when my piano teacher first told me this, I didn't believe her, so I went home and looked up all my favorite romantic composers—and, yup, nearly all of 'em kicked the bucket early.) Other eras of music have favored older composers, but it seems youthfulness was inextricably linked to the sound of romanticism.
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You know, a lot of major mathematics is done young, too.
I think there's a profound difference between narrative art and other kinds of genius. It's said that there are very few good writers below the age of thirty, because you need time to live a little and learn about the world and simply learn enough to be able to produce something worth a damn. "For a single verse, one must see many cities."
As for prolificness, I think we probably do best with a blend of both types, which is for the best, because I'm pretty sure it's something inherent to the artist and unchangeable.
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I'm not sure I agree that an author's prolificness is something inherent/unchangeable, though. There's certainly plenty of authors who were writing to get paid, and as a result ended up writing an awful lot more than they might have if they were left to their own devices. So maybe A Tale of Two Cities would've been better if Dickens weren't getting paid to publish it in serial form (because of extra time to perfect everything, or whatever), or maybe it would've been worse (because he would've wandered off into pretentiousness-land), but societal factors seemed to affect the way he was writing.
But yeah, I definitely think a certain level of age/maturity/experience is necessary to be able to write anything worthwhile. I tried to find this one article that discussed it, but I failed—basically, it talked about how, while music and math prodigies are reasonably common, writing prodigies aren't really a thing. The closest they could find were kids who had a decent amount of stylistic/technical mastery, but their stories' plots tended to be derivative and the characters lacked depth. Which is the sort of thing that life experience really helps with.
(Amusing aside: when I was in middle school, I took piano pretty seriously and harbored secret ambitions of being a video game music composer. Anyway, I'd written and performed this one piano piece for a recital, and on the way home, my mom, completely straight-faced and in earnest, asked me if I would be composing any more music or if I "only had one song" in me. I was thirteen. People have really funny ideas about art sometimes, or something.)
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Also for what it's worth I'm pretty sure I would hate Dickens no matter how much time he spent on something. *shot*no subject
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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I decidedly agree with your afterthought that there's some correct balance of work and free time that makes one want to write. Let me add "stress" in there, too, because an overabundance of stress tends to make me want to curl up and mope instead of doing creative things. And let me also retroactively amend that it may not be "wanting to write", but "writing better". In hindsight I produced a shitton of words during the year I had entirely too much free time. It was simply that not very much of it was good, and that the words to free time ratio was poorer.
I also agree Tchaikovsky, and I had some friends back in the day who'd said a similar thing. You have inspiration sometimes, and when you do that's great. But most of the time you're going to have to work without it, and it's that "baseline" writing ability you need to improve, because inspiration is merely a gift when you can take it.
I'd also like to ask whether we're talking about how many words a writer spits out, or how many works they finish. I think it's a very different exercise to spit out a few errata and scenes that don't click and abandon it, than to persevere through the course of a work. (And it's the latter I have trouble with, whenever I start whining about writing. I suspect I've written 10k or more words this summer; they just aren't forming a coherent piece.)
Likewise one might ask what output really counts as output. We basically essay at each other every couple of days here in fandom, and I think much of it contributes to the kind of thought that does on some level improve creative writing ability. But it's not the same as putting something out.
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...
No, but I do think there's the cultural idea of the genius scientist who comes up with rad ideas out of nowhere, vs the one who slaves over data and memorizes stuff/crunches numbers.
Also "mawkish southern sentimentality" is basically the perfect phrase for To Kill a Mockingbird.
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I've resorted to various forms of trickery, since then, to force myself to actually finish stuff sometimes, both origfic and fanfic—and I (quite tentatively) think that I'm becoming a better writer for it, just because I'm forcing myself to regularly wrestle with larger, story-structure-related issues that I hadn't been confronting in years. (mostly it's just made me aware of how much stuff I haven't tried, and how much experimentation I still need to do, and so much to improve so little time, oi.)
but yeah, re: words vs. works, I guess it sort of depends on what the writer wants or needs to focus on—I don't think the time I spent writing random unfinished scenes was a waste, and I learned things, but focusing more on finished works seems to be benefiting me for the time being.
and re: essay-ing on creative process... hm. there was a time when I basically thought reading/talking about writing was mostly navel-gazing bullshit, and the only way you could really learn or improve on anything of value was just sitting down and writing. so I guess this meta-writing talk still feels weird and new to me, and while I'm enjoying it, I'm still undecided as to how much it's impacting my own work, so I suppose the jury's still out for me on that one.