"To be a great writer, a really great writer, you only have to get it right once. If you hit it dead on the nose, you're done." Erica Wagner in The Times.

Discuss.

Deb

What do you think? Do you think one great novel or one great play (or whatever) makes you great, even if you've also turned out some rubbish?

The comment was on the death of J D Salinger, whose main work is of course The Catcher in the Rye, and who stopped publishing what he wrote because of his intense privacy issues. They now reckon they'll be a wodge of unpublished stuff of his hitting the stands, and were speculating on whether it matters whether it's genius or crap. If genius, it just confirms what we already thought about him... if it's crap, we still laud him for his classic.

Deb

The question is, how many dud mss do you have to write, before you hit the big one?

I'd agree with it. 'To Kill A Mocking Bird' and 'Wuthering Heights' were all it took for Harper Lee and Emily Bronte.

What's interesting is that the most famous examples only wrote the one book - and I do wonder if Salinger's status may be jeopardised by the discovery of other, inferior works. 'Catcher in the Rye' would still be a classic, but would Salinger be such a literary god?

For instance, would we rate Golding higher if he'd only written 'Lord of the Flies'? L.P. Hartley, if he'd only written 'The Go Between'? I think Richard Adams would certainly enjoy a higher position if 'Watership Down' were the only book he'd ever written. It makes all the difference between a literary giant and a 'one-hit wonder'.

Possibly the only way for a great writer to survive a less-successful book is to write a second 'hit' to ensure their place in the hall of fame. D.H. Lawrence deserves to be boiled in oil for 'The Plumed Serpent', but because he wrote 'The Rainbow' as well as 'Sons and Lovers' he survived. Orwell wrote his fair share of unmemorable books, but because he wrote '1984' as well as 'Animal Farm' he's deservedly up there.

I'm finding this terrifying, actually, as I'm currently struggling with Second Book Syndrome. You don't have to be a 'great writer' to panic that you'll never again write anything as good as your first...

I wonder if that's why Salinger never published again?

Really interesting points, Louise. It is interesting to wonder if one great work is tainted by other, less brilliant ones. I don't know... I think to some extent people are judged by their best. To take a completely different frame of reference, Kylie is judged by her better songs, not her worst.

Maybe we all accept, even non-creative people, that you're not going to hit gold with every piece of work? You need to experiment to have a chance of getting it right, and some of the experiments won't work as well as others? To be great, maybe all you need to do is hit gold once, or some of the time?

I expect every writer has a store of rubbish they didn't publish, and some of them have published stuff which maybe should have stayed in that store... Personally I wouldn't hold it against someone if they have published some of the poorer stuff. It's a journey, rather than a straight line to greatness.

(Personally, I doubt I'll ever have to worry about this stuff... )

Deb

I think you're right, Debbie, and can only hope everyone sees it the same way. That is a great line: 'It's a journey, rather than a straight line to greatness.' I wish I'd written it.

I think that's perhaps why we can accept people who write mediocre work before they write 'the big one' but struggle to accept those who follow up a masterpiece with something we find disappointing. Everyone forgives Shakespeare 'Titus Andronicus' - but would they if he'd written it after 'King Lear'?

Yet I'm not sure it's so simple. It would be lovely to believe that once a writer has found the gold seam they can tap into it at will, but I don't think that's necessarily true. Yes, I know more about what I'm doing than I did when I started and will hopefully never again write the kind of rubbish I honestly thought was good in my first and second drafts of the first book - but even looking at what I wrote last night I know I'm still more than capable of writing 'crap'. All right, I'm a lowly commercial hack, but I suspect even great writers may not be able ever to say 'I've cracked this now, from now on it's ALL going to be this good.'

In some ways, I think the greater the writer the less likely that is to be true. Great writers take risks: they think the unthinkable. Sometimes that will go horribly wrong and Dickens will produce Little Nell, but if you never risk writing utter stinking garbage you'll never write anything that hits the heights either. The safe line is relatively easy and can produce good, steady sales, but whatever 'great' is, I don't think it's steady.

At least this is what I'm telling myself as I furiously delete everything I've written in the last 24 hours....

Yes, I do think that sometimes one hits a 'sweet spot', which feels just like that moment in tennis. Writing fiction, because of its essentially 'as if' nature, every bloody time we're trying to bring things together which haven't been brought together before. I bet you'd find that most writers with several books feel that in some but not all everything came together to be particularly perfect, if you see what I mean: some sort of moment when the marriage of ideas, form, voice was completely happy, and the cosmos granted that rest of life was in a state that you could make the most of it. And, to a degree, like the point about Dickens, the more risks you take, the more likely you are not to pull it off, because some combinations will go together more sweetly than others. And the bolder the combination, the harder it will be to pull of, and the more likely you'll be to commit Little Nell.

Which is one of the reasons I think deciding the finalists out of a bunch of good novels in a competition is so completely impossible. Which rates higher, an incredibly bold book which doesn't quite come off, or one which is trying a much less difficult thing but brings it off perfectly?

Emma