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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Mencken describes Fitzgerald's increasing skill as a writer as a rare thing.

I would argue that among really good writers, it's not rare at all. The usual course is for an author to keep learning for years, figure out what works well for them, and perhaps lose a little ground towards the end of their lives due to failing health or lack of care.

Similarly, good technologists build a workshop full of techniques that experience has given them, do their highest quality work in middle to late middle age, and then retreat from active building to teach, critique or advise.

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>Mencken describes Fitzgerald's increasing skill as a writer as a rare thing.

It's not rare among really good writers, Mencken is saying a really good writer is what is rare.

With "a really good writer" being defined not as one who produces one good book.

Mencken's chosen qualifiers are right there in the text:

"I make much of this improvement because it is of an order not witnessed in American writers; and seldom, indeed, in those who start off with popular success."

Emphasis mine. American writers and the one-hit wonders of the literary world tend to get worse rather than better, he's saying. The first is probably a justifiable statement at the time—decent-to-good American literature was rare (though not entirely absent) in the English corpus before the moderns (many of whom preferred to live in Europe, anyway).

>The usual course is for an author to keep learning for years, figure out what works well for them, and perhaps lose a little ground towards the end of their lives due to failing health or lack of care.

I haven't found that to be true, at least amongst successful authors. Certainly not enough to call it 'the usual course.' Most authors who I have seen be successful in early life don't write their best works in middle or late age.

I think one of the problems which may make it appear that this is the case, whether or not it actually is, is that once an author has achieved some success, they are granted increasing deference by editors and publishers; this may lead to the quality of their finished work declining even while their writing skill increases.

That's true, but we see the same phenomenon in a lot of fields where that isn't as true — such as bands' later albums — so it seems likely to me that there's something deeper at work a lot of the time.

I suspect it's some combination of that and:

- They had a reserve of good ideas and used them up faster than they could generate new ones

- Their initial efforts had a lot of time to "cook" in their heads, while the later ones were forced out (similar to what you propose, only it's their internal editor that's slacking off)

- They lose their enthusiasm for the profession, but they don't want to give up the success and identity they've built in the field

There may be other fields where that isn't as true, but bands albums aren't one of them; bands relations with labels and producers, etc., have much the same as authors with publishers and editors. Basically, once their name is going to make the sale on its own, other people in the production chain are less likely to say no.

OTOH, I think that quality of work (judged, as it always is, by subjective appeal to some critic or set of critics) with constant skill has considerable variation in most artistic endeavors, and what makes a name is usually not the kind of work that most people can turn in day in and day out. Saying that skill goes down after someone becomes famous is, I think, a lot like saying people's skill at the lottery tends to go down after they hit the jackpot.

> - They had a reserve of good ideas and used them up faster than they could generate new ones

I think the quality and complexity of the ideas also matters, perhaps more even than quantity. Some of my favorite 'creators' who become better over time tend to focus on essentially the same thing over and over again (more than others, it seems). But their later works are richer and better and developments from earlier works.

How often do really good writers come along? It's interesting to hear what contemporaries thought of Gatsby because, 90 years later, we know that it is an Important Book. On the other hand, how many people will read Stephen King or Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey in the year 2100, even though these were commercial blockbusters in our time?

Stephen King is so prolific that I imagine some of his works will have real staying power. Even if he's merely a "good" author, odds are that at least one of his works will be far better than his own average.

My vote is for the first dark tower book. That one above all others I've read remains fun to think about.

Even if you just consider the film classics based on his books (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Shining), he'll have staying power as people will find his books through the films.

Then there's the cultural impact he's had. Stranger Things was basically a Stephen King novel and even directly name-dropped him.

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