Can't. Stop. Writing.

Care of Zen In Darkness: Here's a very interesting article--Can't. Stop. Writing.--over at the New York Times, by Geoff Nicholson. An excerpt:

Matters of literary quantity have been much on my mind since a new book of mine was published recently. A fair percentage of the reviews described me as “prolific” or “highly prolific,” in one case “wildly prolific.” Now, I’m not going to argue about the accuracy of this. I’ve published 20 books in 22 years (some quite short), and I’d say that’s not excessive, given that I don’t have a day job. But accurate or not, “prolific” definitely didn’t feel like an unalloyed compliment.

I’ve consoled myself by noting that the “prolific” tag puts me in some good, if otherwise unlikely, company — that of Joyce Carol Oates, for instance (more than 100 books in 45 years). Has anyone in recent decades been able to review her work without mentioning prolificacy? John Updike couldn’t manage it. His review of Oates’s “You Must Remember This” referred to her “astounding productivity,” and suggested she was born a hundred years too late and “needs a lustier audience” of “Victorian word eaters.”

Coming from Updike (60 or so books in 50 years, more if you include all the poetry), this seemed a bit rich. He, if anybody, should have understood. Those who wrote his recent obituaries certainly found it hard to get past the astounding fact that Updike was a writer who actually did a lot of writing. The Associated Press called him “prolific, even compulsive,” and The Los Angeles Times declared, “For better or worse, John Updike produced a nearly endless stream of work.” Not completely endless, then.

Among a younger generation, William T. Vollmann is the poster boy, or whipping boy, for “excessive” literary productivity: 20 or so books in as many years, with his possibly developing carpal tunnel syndrome in the process. And they’re mostly whoppers: an 800-page novel here, a seven-volume study of violence there. “By amassing such a vast bibliography . . . Vollmann has probably denied himself the readership he might other­wise have enjoyed,” James Gibbons once asserted in Bookforum. I’m not sure I follow the logic, but the notion that the more you write the less likely you are to be read is undoubtedly cause for writerly despair.

Gibbons also said, “The truly prolific author, as distinct from the merely respectably productive one, is either a genre writer or a relic.” Undeniably he’s right in identifying prolificacy as a distinction between “popular” and “serious” literature. Prolificacy is not just permitted in genre novelists, it’s insisted upon. If the likes of Dean Koontz, Danielle Steel and James Patterson (you can add your own favorites here) weren’t so prolific, they wouldn’t be nearly so popular. Supply and demand are mutually supportive at the “low” end: copious production thrives on copious consumption. If we start invoking Trollope or Dickens as popular, prolific writers who also have literary respectability, we’re only confirming that there’s something antique about the idea of creating a large body of serious yet popular writing.

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.

Samuel Beckett may seem an unlikely person to quote in this context, but I regularly find myself thinking of a passage from “Worstward Ho.” He isn’t referring specifically to literary production, but his words apply perfectly well. He writes: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” We all do, over and over again, some more prolifically than others.