Prolific writers highlight that writers’ minds are different from yours, but book reviewers and literary criticism do not acknowledge the mental difference.
Many people imagine that they could write one novel. But when they see that some writers have published a dozen novels, they are not sure that they could write that many. And when they see that some novelists have published twenty, fifty, or, in some cases, literally hundreds of novels, they begin to suspect that their own mind and the minds of these prolific writers are different.
And since there is a prejudice against people who are different, book reviewers and literary criticism tend to disparage writers who are prolific.
Stephen King, who is considered prolific—although there are writers who are much more prolific than he is (1, 2, 3)—published an essay in The New York Times defending prolific writers. He mentions, in passing, a little of how his own mind works:
“As a young man, my head was like a crowded movie theater where someone has just yelled “Fire!” and everyone scrambles for the exits at once. I had a thousand ideas but only 10 fingers and one typewriter. There were days — I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating — when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane” (4).
King, who, as he says, hears voices—which elsewhere he describes as his muse, narrators, and characters; and which I discuss in past posts in terms of alternate personalities—is neither psychotic nor essentially different from other prolific novelists.
But are prolific writers different from writers who are not prolific? So far, in my study of over one hundred writers, I have found that nearly all novelists, prolific and nonprolific alike, have a normal version of multiple personality.
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