The advent of the age of quantity
The Internet is quantity. There is a term that well defines the state of things in new media. The term is critical mass. If an activity, an initiative, a content does not reach a certain critical mass, it is socially, culturally and economically irrelevant. The value of an online resource is measured by the number of its unique users, advertising pays for impressions and clicks, artists are compensated for the number of times they are seen, heard or read. Everything is quantity. The higher a number, the higher the relevance of who has that number.
In general, quantity is paired with quality, which could also be its opposite or alter ego and instead it has happened that quality has been subsumed into quantity. Quality as we once understood it, i.e. a property attributed to something by a cluster of experts or intellectuals often polluted by conflicts of interest, is now a footnote in the new media. Fortunately one might say, mediation is a sign of backwardness. But there are, as in any historical process, strongly dialectical elements in this evolution.
There are those who have begun to see the consequences of this situation, consequences that are by no means magnificent and progressive. And there are also those who have begun to rebel.
Content and quality
Ev Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, was horrified by the deleterious consequences (read “Trump”) of the creature he himself gave life to and decided that something had to be done to correct it. He then founded Medium which, now, is the best thing on the web. Medium is everything Twitter or Facebook are not and never will be: it has no advertising, the contents are analytical and verified, the contributors are paid, users pay to read or listen to them and a group of editors, according to specific guidelines, takes to find the right balance between quality and quantity in recommending content to the public.
Williams recently wrote:
“Personally I think that quality is not sustainable in a publishing industry solely powered by advertising. We at Medium are strongly committed to building a subscription-based publishing model, where the quality of content (from individual authors or publications) is compensated based on its value to readers."
Here we have found an acceptable point of balance between quantity and quality. The latter returns to being valorised no longer in a relationship of total subsumption in quantity. However, the latter remains decisive, even if democratically determined, not on the basis of the needs of advertisers, but on that of readers seeking authentic information and culture.
And surprisingly the concept works as proof that there is another way to do it, even though to date Medium has lost money like Florence's water system loses water.
Doomed to prolificacy
For those who live on writing or aspire to do so, however, the theme of prolificacy or, more brutally, of critical mass exists, especially with the advent of new media. At this point one wonders if the necessary prolificacy is really the enemy of quality, as the general perception is inclined to believe. He is probably not her enemy at all, on the contrary, as a giant of writing, himself rather prolific, like Stephen King tends to believe.
On the question of the writer's prolificity, King entrusted his reflections to an article, published in the op-ed pages of the "New York Times", entitled "Can a Novelist Be Too Productive?". Below we offer you the Italian translation of this important and amusing reflection.
For anyone who wants to explore in depth the creative process of this writer, who has few equals in the panorama of contemporary literature, we certainly recommend reading On Writing in the recent edition of Frassinelli.
Quantity equal cheesy?
There are many implicit postulates in literary criticism, one of which is: the more one writes, the more banal one's work becomes. Joyce Carol Oates, author of more than fifty novels (not counting the 11 written under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly) makes us realize how little use critics are to prolific writers. [Oates is published in Italy by Mondadori and in the summer of 2017 she was a guest in Barolo at the Collisions Festival].
In one of his diaries he noted that he certainly wrote much more than the literary world allows for a "serious" writer. Like all postulates, which have to do with personal perception, the equation prolific writing equals bad writing must be taken with caution. In many cases that may indeed be the case. Certainly no one can be induced to include John Creasey, author of 564 novels under 21 different pseudonyms, in the museum of literary giants; both he and his creations (Toff, Inspector Roger West, Sexton Blake etc.) have been largely forgotten.
The same can be said of the English writer Ursula Bloom (over 500 publications under many pseudonyms) and a host of other writers. You might also recall Truman Capote's famous line about Jack Kerouac: "It's not writing, it's typing!"
The Agatha Christie case
As a matter of fact, some prolific writers have had a profound influence on the public consciousness. Just think of Agatha Christie, arguably the most popular writer of the 20th century, whose works are still widely reprinted around the world today. Christie wrote 91 books, 82 of hers in her own name and 9 under the stage name Mary Westmacott or married name Agatha Christie Mallowan.
His novels may not be literary masterpieces, but neither are they the molasses cooked up by John Creasey. Some works by the English writer are surprisingly good. Christie gave us two characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, who achieved the enviable status of immortality. If we then add to this the stylistic and thematic unity of her novels, the welcoming warmth of the settings, the English stereotypes inserted in the context of her incredibly icy vision of human nature, it happens that the reader looks at these books in a light that is always different.
Something similar can be said of the prolific writer John D. MacDonald [published in Italy by Mondadori, like Christie]. Travis McGee's stories appear hopelessly dated today and many of his 40 novels are an indigestible smoothie of Ernest Hemingway and John O'Hara. But when MacDonald casts aside his fictional heroes and writes exclusively about himself, he does an impressive job. His best novels, such as The End of the Night and The Last One Left, rise to the level of that "mutant beast we call American literature."
No sensible person could claim that quantity guarantees quality, but to say that quantity never produces quality seems to me haughty, senseless, and blatantly false.
Non-prolific writers
Let us now consider the other side of the spectrum. Donna Tartt, one of the best authors to emerge in the last half century, has published only three novels since 1992. Jonathan Franzen, the only American storyteller of her equal, published only five.
It's easy to look at these few books, each of extraordinary quality, and conclude that less is more. Perhaps. Philip Roth [published in Italy by Einaudi], who has only recently retired, has written a multiple of the books of the two combined. Our Gang is terrible, but American Pastoral seems to me an even better work than Tartt's The Goldfinch and Franzen's Freedom.
I'm a former alcoholic and haven't had a drop in 27 years and, today, the thought of occasionally drinking crosses my mind. So when I think of Tartt's and Franzen's eight novels – not enough to fill a half meter of shelf in my library – I am reminded of the lunch I had with my wife soon after giving up alcoholism, twenty years ago.
In the restaurant, sitting near our table, there were two elderly ladies. They argued animatedly, neglecting to sip the wine from the two glasses forgotten in the center of the table. I felt an urgent need to get up and talk to her. I felt a great desire to address her: “It's simply not right. Why don't you drink your wine? For God's sake, I'm sitting next to you, I can't drink, I don't have that privilege anymore, but you can so why the heck don't you?”.
The long gap between one book and another by highly talented writers similarly drives me mad. I fully understand that each of us works at a different speed and has a personal creative process. I understand that these writers are scrupulous, they weigh every sentence – every word – to obtain, by borrowing one of Franzen's best books, a Strong Motion. I know very well that it's not about laziness, but about respect for one's work and I know, from my own experience, that haste produces crap.
If you have talent, write!
But I also know that life is short and that at the end of the day none of us are prolific. The creative spark fades with time and death extinguishes it. William Shakespeare hasn't written a new play in 400 years. This, my friends, is a long abstinence.
All this is not an alibi to justify my prolificacy. Yes, I have published more than 55 novels. Yes, I also used a pseudonym (Richard Bachman). Yes, I published 4 books in one year (few compared to James Patterson… with the difference that mine were longer and written without the help of collaborators). And yes, I once wrote a novel (The Running Man) in just one week. But I can honestly say that I had no choice. As a young man my head was crowded with thoughts as happens in a cinema hall when, shouting "fire", all the spectators flock in unison towards the exit. I had thousands of ideas but only 10 fingers and a single typewriter. There were days – and I'm not kidding you or exaggerating – where all those voices rumbling in my mind just freaked me out. Looking back on my twenties I often think of the poem by John Keats which begins: "When I fear I might cease to exist / Before my pen has reaped my teeming brain."
I guess the same thing happened to Frederick Schiller Faust better known as Max Brand (and even better known as the creator of Doctor Kildare). He wrote 450 novels, a feat made all the more remarkable by his failing health and untimely death at age 51. Alessandro Dumas wrote The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers and 250 other novels. And there's Isaac Asimov, who sold his first story at 19, going on to publish more than 500 books and revolutionize the science fiction genre.
Prolificacy is inevitable
Accepted?—?condition of person or animal that has generated several children. Also fig., with regard to the production of intellectual works: p. of a writer, of an artist (Treccani) – has an optimistic sound, at least to my ears.
Not everyone agrees. I remember one party at which someone, the self-appointed arbiter of literary taste, mocked Joyce Carol Oates that she "was an old lady who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do with them!" In fact Ms. Oates knows exactly what she is doing and why she is doing it. “I still have many other stories to tell” she says in one of her diaries and “many other novels”. And I'm happy because I want to read them. Talent without prolificacy is wasted.
