I was a huge fan of Robert Parker since high school in the 70’s. Always snatched the newest book off the shelves right after it hit paperback.
But, any Parker fan knows his books were hit and miss. There were some really good ones and a few clunkers. He had an amazing output. Cranking out over thirty Spenser books. Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall series too. He also wrote a few westerns. He died a few years ago in front of his typewriter.
Robert Lundlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.
Is it better for an author to just write, write and write some more? Or is it better to strive for perfection? Rip up or even discard book ideas that maybe aren’t panning out?
Looking back at Parker’s work. Would the great books happen if he hadn’t written the clunkers in between? Spener dipped in the 80’s but got better after Parker wrote a few Jesse Stone books. Spenser seemed fresher in the 90’s.
I’ve never read anything by her so I can’t comment on the quality, but I know Danielle Steele publishes something like a book a year (or did, not sure if she still does). I’m assuming she just feels compelled to write. A member of my family is friends with her and she would get letters that were pages and pages long.
Being prolific and being of variable quality are not the same thing. For a science fiction example, Asimov was far more prolific than Heinlein (heck, Asimov was more prolific than almost anyone), but Heinlein was considerably more variable: Heinlein’s best books are better than Asimov’s best, but Heinlein’s worst are far worse than Asimov’s worst.
And either style can work, depending on the author. I enjoy most of Asimov’s work, who never bothered with a second draft and just churned out as fast as he could type, but I also enjoy all of Tolkien’s work, who was still obsessing over fine details in his earliest works when he died.
I’m pretty sure Asimov always did a second draft - but that was it.
Here’s a cite How to write a lot - CSMonitor.com “My second draft is 90 percent my first draft, because in my first draft I’m just saying what I mean. That enables me to write a lot and to enjoy writing.”
Just to agree with what everyone else has said–it depends. Some authors can produce a novel or more every year for their whole lives and produce good, reliable work in all of them–Isaac Asimov has been mentioned, but also PG Wodehouse and Terry Pratchett.
Others produce a lot of work by churning out huge amounts of crap–Piers Anthony springs to mind.
Actually, it occurs to me that the defining quality of high-productive authors is reliability. Can anybody come up with a highly-productive author with widely variable output? Some masterpieces and some utter dreck?
There are plenty of authors that pretty much run out of ideas in one or two books, particularly if they are episodic, but keep churning them out because… money, pressure from the publishers and publicists and public, etc. The first name to come to mind is Philip Jose Farmer and his Reverworld series. There’s Jack Chalker and his Wellworld series. There’s whoever that guy was who wrote about the crime-solving cat.
I would guess, though I don’t have evidence to back it up, that most authors follow a downward track. Or maybe I should limit that to fiction writers. Biographers, historians and journalists aren’t making up a universe for us to buy into. They’re telling someone else’s story with their own style, which seems not to be so prone to … unevenness, for lack of a better term.
I can’t think of many authors who produce what I’d call a lot. Brandon Sanderson is the only one who springs to mind, and his stuff is consistently excellent, but not always what I want him to be working on.
I’ve only read a few of Sue Grafton’s books. She has that alphabet series A is for , B is for, she’s all the way through the alphabet now.
Has her writing stood up or is it hit and miss? She’s really been cranking out the books.
I’ve found Brad Meltzer very hit and miss. There’s a couple of his thrillers that I just couldn’t finish. They were putting me to sleep. Others that Brad wrote are pretty good.
I suspect not - a charity shop I worked at, I was in charge of the books. I grew to hate this woman and her books because we were donated tons of copies and never sold any. And we never did get a complete collection of the series - never higher than E or F. Until this thread I didn’t know the series went any higher. It seems like people read that far then gave the books away, maybe due to a decline in quality starting around book E?
As much as I love PG Wodehouse, I have to say that the Jeeves and Wooster books especially are pretty much minor variations on a theme rather than distinct and original works like Pratchett’s, so I don’t know if that should be taken into account.
What do you think of Joyce Carol Oates? Her bibliography is staggering, she’s won a ton of awards, and she has three novels coming out this year alone.
I’ve only read some of her short stories, and they were pretty good, but I’ve always been a little incredulous that someone can write that quickly, go through editorial review that quickly, and consistently produce high-quality work.
Danielle Steel writes between two and four books a year. From the little old ladies that frequent the library, I’m told they’re mostly the same plot recycled over and over again.
The “Alphabet series” really took off around M Is For Malice, which came out in the mid 90s.
I’m not sure Grafton qualifies for this thread as she’s only written 22 books in the series in the last 30 years (and one collection of short stories). She hardly measures up to King or Koontz or Danielle Steel’s two to four books a year.
Mystery authors tend to produce a large number of books. Look at Agatha Christi. Almost all of hers were top drawer. John Dickson Carr, on the other hand, had a very much weaker batting average. Tony Hillerman’s books are consistently high quality. I can only think of one or two that really were not high quality. Erle Stanley Gardner were consistent. I suppose you have to be a Perry Mason fan to decide where that consistency falls.
Regarding one of the most prolific authors I knew, Louis L’Amour. Westerns aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but he consistently wrote the best of them.
Mystery and romance, more than other genre fiction, rely on formula. Writers can crank out lots because they’re essentially the same, but no one complains because that’s pretty much why they’re buying them.
I’ve been discovering that Urban Fantasy is like this, as most of it seems to be a mix of mystery and romance. You’ve got a supernatural protagonist (typically female) working some sort of case, while also in an on-again off-again relationship with some dude (typically a cop or other authority figure). They sort of blur together after a couple.
It also appears that publishers want at least one a year for a series, but authors direct-publishing to Amazon are cranking them out faster (with lesser quality).
I wouldn’t call Robert B. Parker’s output hit-and-miss throughout his career. The Spenser novels up through A Catskill Eagle were uniformly good; some of them were excellent, and at least two were brilliant. Eagle was published in, I think, 1985, and I think he was emotionally done with Spenser, Susan & Hawk at this point. After that he was doing them from contractual obligations and for the paycheck; I can hardly blame him. Even the books from the latter half of the series are rarely actually bad; they’re just workmanlike. And his non-Spenser stuff – Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone, all the Westerns – was always good. I always suspected that he churned out a Spenser a year to subsidize the others.
In a good and just world, someone would have given Piers Anthony the choice between giving up his word processor or his fingers long ago.
Valerie Martin doesn’t write enough. Neither does Mary Gaitskill or Ernest Gaines.
Ooo, have you checked out Kat Richardson’sGreywalker series? I’ve found these really well done, though I haven’t read any other urban fantasy for comparison. Admittedly, part of my enjoyment of the series is the Seattle setting — I live in eastern Washington but have spent enough time in Seattle that I was familiar with many of the locations in the books. And the author did a nice job with several scenes in one book that were set in/around a small town about 25 miles from me, particularly with incorporating that town’s somewhat unique history.
OP: I love it when I find an author I like and then discover that he/she is very prolific. I’ve read almost every work of fiction that Asimov ever published that made it into book form; I think I’m only missing a handful of his Black Widowers stories and probably some of his later work that appeared in his magazine. In fact, since I discovered Asimov when I was still pretty young, his writing had a big influence on what I like in a novel, style-wise.
I’m a big fan of novel series. Largely, this is because once I find a story I like, I hate it when it ends. So if it can just keep going and going, I’m happy as a clam. Unless, of course, it starts turning into crap.
He died a few years ago in front of his typewriter.