Several
years ago I posted a piece on the importance of “Quantity Before Quality” in
writing. The focus was thriller-mystery master John D. MacDonald. Coming home
after World War II, he taught himself to write—starting with pulp fiction—by working
“12 and 14 hours a day, seven days a week.”
That
self-imposed apprenticeship, as I pointed out , was very much in keeping with
Malcolm Gladwell’s now celebrated formula (in Outliers) of 10,000 hours to
achieve mastery in a chosen field. Gladwell cites a surprising
spectrum of exemplars, from Mozart to the Beatles, Bill Gates to the top Canadian
hockey players.
In
his first four months of writing, MacDonald completed 800,000 words of typed
manuscript, kept “at least 30 stories in
the mail to the magazines at all times,” papered his small workroom with form
rejection slips and lost 20 pounds. In short-story format, he estimated he
wrote the equivalent of 10 full-length books in those four months—a “classic
example of learning by doing. Had I done a novel a year, it would have taken me
ten years to acquire the precision and facility I acquired in four months.”
Even
so, after that grueling startup, MacDonald was barely eking out a living. By
the second year “extreme financial pressures were eased” and he continued to labor forward on a decades-long path to best-sellerdom.
For
years, battling my own laziness, I marveled at this four-month chrysalis of effort in which JDM metamorphosed himself into a great storyteller. From what source did he summon the “true grit” to work himself that hard day after day—and where might
I find a similar motivation? It was
only the other day that I came across an additional paragraph* that helps
explain what made Johnny write:
(*In
John D. MacDonald by Davod Geherin, p. 3)
It turns out he
simply didn’t know any better. Having encountered no other writers (he had just returned home from the war), MacDonald had no clear idea how a writer
ought to go about his work. He recalls: “I thought you got up in the morning
and went to work and worked till lunch and then went back to work until the day
was over—with good business habits, as in any other job. It wasn’t until my
habit patterns were firmly embedded that I discovered that writers tended to
work a couple of hours and then to brood about it the rest of the day.”
MacDonald,
in other words, treated the creative process as a job of work.
Other
literary prodigies obviously shared MacDonald's work ethic. At his peak, Georges Simenon produced
six novels a year and churned out his best-selling mysteries featuring
Inspector Maigret a chapter a day for eleven or twelve days running. During this time,
the Belgian master remained reclusive: “I don’t see anybody, I don’t speak to
anybody, I don’t take phone calls—I live just like a monk. All the day I am one
of my characters. I feel what he feels.”* By the time Simenon typed “Fin,” he was utterly exhausted. This is writing as performance (which reminds one of two great writer-actors, Shakespeare and Dickens).
(*
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, p. 151.)
John
Creasey, an English crime writer, seems to have outstripped both Simenon and MacDonald in
output. In 1937 alone, twenty-nine of Creasey's books were published. According to
the John Creasey Online Resource,
the author “was so prolific that a
comprehensive catalogue of his work has never been completed. Even the man
himself lost count of the number of titles that he wrote.” But here’s an estimate: ”He
published 562 books following 743 rejection slips, with worldwide sales [as of
November 1971] of over 80 million copies in at least 5000 different editions in
28 different languages.”
 | |
| London (l) and L'Amour |
Like
MacDonald, and Dickens, and many another novelist, Creasey worked assorted
jobs, including clerical, factory, and sales, while trying to establish himself
as a writer. For more colorful employment histories, check out the CVs of Jack
London and Louis L’Amour.
Of course, sheer antlike industry is no
guarantee of success. I offer a cautionary tale from the Guinness Book of
World Records (between 1976 until 1982) of one William Gold, labeled the
world‘s “Least Successful Author” who “has earned only 50 cents after 18 years
of unceasing labor.”
Maybe
that’s some support for Simenon’s advice: “I think that everyone who does not
need to be a writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do something
else… Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.”
*
Notables
names from a Wikipedia list of writers of prodigious output: Isaac Asimov (who
wrote as fast as he could type, which was 80 wpm; I know, he once dictated an
article to me over the phone), Barbara Cartland, Alexandre Dumas and R. L.
Stine.
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