Is it good to be prolific? -- Garbo
Recently, while going through the list of contributors for an anthology of 19th and 20th century authors, I ended up wading through a long list of works by each author. There were dozens and dozens of pieces of fiction, many I'd never heard anything about.
Some writers, in their lifetimes, had published one or two stories in magazines, and then nobody ever heard a word from them again until some literary detective found a 1929 mystery mag and discovered a treasure. For some reason, I especially enjoy the literary version of one-hit wonders.
And when I see one of those stories in a modern anthology, I never think "Why didn't you write more, you lazy bum?" because I assume they were living their lives. They had one or two stories to tell, and maybe would have done more but free hours and other resources were limited.
On the other hand, when author bios list the enormous output of someone who's done dozens of stories or even dozens of books, I find myself admiring their industry but also having some side thoughts. One of those, sometimes, is "Yes, but only the first, fourth, seventh, and ninth were good." And sometimes I wonder if this prolific person really did all the writing, or if they had a team. And even if they did write every word, how did life go on around them? Who paid the bills? Who fried the eggs? Who did the editing and proofreading? Was that a good thing for everybody?
I know I would have a larger body of work by now if I'd put writing first. I'm mostly good with the choices I made about where to put my focus over the years. My awesome daughter is in her twenties now and my memories of swing sets at the park, Sailor Moon, and lunches of fish sticks and tater tots and one lonely floret of broccoli make me be happy in a way that a byline or a good review never would have.
Even while I was employed in a series of low-wage gigs, as long as they weren't the kind of job that tried the soul right out of me, I didn't really resent my need for gainful employment. I did useful things that made life better for people. And sometimes I wrote on the bus going to or coming home from work. Sometimes I wrote on my lunch break. Sometimes I wrote about the people I worked with, or about how my bosses treated me, or what I wish could have happened at work instead of what did happen.
In fact, some of my jobs helped me to get maximum benefit out of my limited writing time. In my twenties and thirties, I worked as a cleaning woman from time to time, and others with experience told me to charge by the job, not the hour.
This was excellent advice and I became very efficient, never walking across a room without carrying something, and all that. This carried over into my creative time, and I could write in two hours what might take someone else all day to do.
Going the other direction, writing helped me see what was important to me, and it gave me a focus for those times when my jobs were both poor in pay and soul-draining. I so clearly remember a period in my life when my "writing desk" was a card table set up next to my kitchen stove. I recall my longing gaze at a portable typewriter sitting on the card table, with a three-quarters-full typewritten sheet scrolled into it. I belonged to a writing group and the manuscript was part of a three-page story excerpt I hoped to have ready to hand out for critique in a couple of days.
But alas, it was 7:45 a.m. and I had to step out the door at 7:50 at the very latest or I would miss my bus. I was working for someone who was very cranky about tardiness and the scolding I would get before 9 a.m. would likely ruin my whole morning. But I couldn't help stepping closer to the old Sears typewriter, and I saw that there was a capped Flair felt-tip pen lying on the roller bar holding down the page.
I read the last two sentences I'd typed the evening before, saw where I could have used a better word, and used the Flair to mark out the old word. I wrote the better word in the space between the lines and capped the felt-tip. "There," I said out loud, alone in my kitchen. "I wrote today." I went to the back door, turned the locking lever on the door knob, let myself out onto the concrete porch, and went off to catch the bus to work.
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| Garbo |
Economy of action. It's such a valuable skill, but most jobs people have don't reward it, and so don't cultivate it. Most of us sell our lives by the hour in most of the jobs we have, and efficiency is only pushed with the desire of squeezing more out of us. In such an environment it would be foolish of us to show how quickly we could get so many things done, so we often end up not only squandering time but sometimes, perversely, wasting effort on the artifice of appearing busy.
ReplyDeleteI know that wasn't the focus of the piece, but it resonated a little more strongly for me, especially as it's something I'm wrestling with more these days both in terms of my current, long-term job (there both with respect to my own job and managing a staff), and as I'm trying to, at long overdue last, build a saner, better life for me.
With respect to authors, I'm far too much of a dilettante to say much with authority. I know some things, but most often fail to dig deeply enough or to get around to revisiting a point of interest and look for more details to link to it.
A friend posted as a simple, quick, joke reference, a poster for a silent era film "Balaoo The Demon Baboon", which sent me digging a little.
I found out that it was based on a 1911 novel by Gaston Leroux, who is best known for having written The Phantom of the Opera. I won't pretend that before that moment I have the slightest idea who had written Phantom. However, a quick look at Leroux saw me presented with a list of over three dozen novels, nine short stories, and a couple of plays he co-authored. I also saw that two sub-groups of the novels were stories centered on recurrent main characters he'd created. Seven of them centered on an amateur detective, Joseph Rouletabille. According to the Leroux wiki entry these contributions to French detective fiction made him the French equivalent of the UK's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the US's Edgar Allen Poe. The first of these was The Mystery of the Yellow Room, and is reportedly one of the first locked room mysteries; a quick look tells me it was adapted into film versions five times, all but one of them in France, between 1913 and 2005.
Seeing all this simultaneously reminded me of two things. One, that the history of pop culture is littered with names "everyone" of a certain era knew, but who were essentially forgotten a generation or two later. Two, almost everything has its fan base, somewhere, and a few loud and repetitive voices (and monomaniacal fan writers) can magnify their devotion such that when found across the years can give the impression that something was a bigger deal in its day than it really was. In the case of Leroux, he partnered with Arthur Bernede fairly early on in his fiction-writing career to form the Société des Cinéromans, which would simultaneously print novels and make them into motion pictures. Some of this creates a sort of circular fame, leaving me unsure how popular and commercially successful all of this was.
One friend for what's now nearly 30 years - another of those I've only known via correspondence, phone calls, and online - has written many novels and some collections of short stories, all of which have only been self-published, set for sale as either print-on-demand items or Kindle editions. He also has a bent as an essayist and blogger. None of this has gotten him anywhere in terms of critical, much less financial, success, but I can't help but wonder how it all might appear otherwise to someone fifty or a hundred years from now who finds a thread and starts tugging on it, who might make a reflexive connection between volume of output and success.
I put my faith in the internet. I hope that your friend's work will leave a digital footprint that will last long enough so some fan will re-discover his work and show it the appreciation it hasn't gotten so far.
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