The Dreaded P Word

There it is, in this weekend's New York Times Book Review—back page, Geoff Nicholson, the P word. The first word most people think when it comes to, say, Joyce Carol Oates. A word that, when it lands, can prick you.

Prolific. Shudders. Prolific. It doesn't feel, as Nicholson writes so well, like "an unalloyed compliment." It can feel indeed like something one has to apologize for, as when the interviewer asks, a burble of impatience in her tone, "What exactly was your thought process, going into that year: A history book? A corporate fable? Two YA novels?"

I have hung my head. I have tried to explain how sometimes books that seem to emerge all at once—in a snap, and in a cluster—were conceived years before they were ever published. How I've spent years writing novels that will never be published (80 drafts of one book; 15 years lost on another). How sometimes the work labored over when young announces its maturity years on, at the most inconvenient time. How the only conceivable benefit of insomnia is that it doubles the work hours in a day. How often my sanity has been tied to the writing work (the panic attacks cured by the search for a word), and how hard it is to stop myself from chasing language, chasing story. And how, nonetheless, there was that one forsaken year when there were too many books, and I couldn't escape myself, and I buried myself in other work so that it would never, and not ever, happen again.

Nicholson's essay is essential for the issues it raises. It's essential for these true and telling—perhaps forgiving?—lines: But perhaps the real reason we keep writing is the hope, naïve perhaps, that we’ll make a better job of it next time. Unless you’re a genius or a fool, you realize that everything you write, however “successful,” is always a sort of failure. And so you try again.