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Originally Posted by BookJunkieLI
How do you know that? Do you ask the author how long it took them to research/plot/write/edit a particular novel? Do you know these authors personally that you know how long it takes them to produce a novel? Or do you "just know" that it took them a "long time" to put it together? Because I call bullshit. Yes, there are some novels that when you read them all you can think is "this was just slapped together and tossed out there". Most novels, there's no way of knowing how long it took the author to write them. Plus if an author frequently writes in the same genre or series, they typically keep all of their notes and research from previous projects so that they do not have to keep researching the same information over and over.
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I don't "know" anything, but I read fantasy. It tends to come in long series. Some are 30+ books. What I can see is that most of the authors I've read take many years to create the first trilogy. Take Terry Brooks for example, just because I've been reading him lately.
He took from 1969-1970 to 1985 to create his first Shannara trilogy, and they are very good books. OK, the first one is somewhat Tolkienesque, but the the second is regarded of one of the best fantasy books of its time (and by some one of the best fantasy books written).
Then, he broke through as a writer, and he started writing a book a year. More and more his series moved from separate books to one very long book with a lot of padding, broken up into three parts, rehashing plots he has used before.
R.A. Salvatore is comparable. David Eddings, in the end, blatantly (almost) copied a book four times (in The Dreamers). Most of the authors I've been reading for a long time are writing worse books the longer they write and the more they write.
Most of those books are not worth rereading. I'll happily reread Brooks' "The Elfstones of Shannara" a few more times, but you won't see me rereading "Dark Legacy of Shannara", which is basically the same story in another time, padded with a subplot (which was a repeat/continuation of the plot in "High Druid of Shannara" actually) and stretched up to fill three books.