Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
Really? I cannot think of any example. All books I have read that survived a long time did not take so long time to write.
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Leaves of Grass was the very first example I gave. Did you not notice?
Other obvious examples:
Ulysses.
Finnegan's Wake.
A Rebours.
Madame Bovary.
And here's the ridiculous thing: You're not even arguing against what I actually said.
And that's assuming you've actually researched the amount of time the lasting books you've read took to write (to the extent you actually could if you were talking about, say, Aeschylus).
You're leaving out at least four additional factors:
1. The luxury of time afforded the writer who's paid impacts their time-efficiency while writing.
2. You haven't factored in the amount of time and practice it took for the writer of that one book to reach the level of craft at which it could be of that quality and yet written at that speed.
3. A body of work isn't down to that one book. No one says that, because Picasso could whip off one painting in a day, he didn't need free time to paint. No one says that because P. needed the
continuity afforded by constant inexhaustible effort to create a body of work that contains a fair number of great paintings. Some painters work all their lives and only produce a few.
4. Time is measured by the hour as well as the day. Virginia Woolf wrote as painstakingly as she did rapidly. She averaged ten drafts at least per book. It looks like she didn't need extra time to write until you see that she spent as much time revising as knocking it out.