In a piece that appeared in New York Magazine on July 1, 2016, an anonymous author asked, “Does Writing Too Much Make You a Hack?”

“We think of hacks as turning out slick prose bereft of inspiration. As somebody once asked about John Updike, ‘Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?’ (The person who raised the question [David Foster Wallace] had recently published a thousand-page novel with a couple hundred pages of endnotes.) Hacks write so much that we stop reading them. In a culture still enamored of the romantic idea of writerly inspiration, hacks are only too sane, with their formulaic helpings of the familiar. Funny that just a few degrees further on the spectrum of the prolific are graphomaniacs, who are literally insane.

“But there’s a class of prolific writers who are neither nuts nor mercenaries (as all hacks are). They are the ones apt to say things like ‘I’m not even faintly myself when I’m not writing,’ as Saul Bellow confided in a letter to Stanley Elkin. Writers who follow their own star may be guilty of many sins and imperfections related to overproduction, but ultimately that output is a sign of health. ‘Sloth in writers is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict,’ Cyril Connolly wrote, ‘especially that laziness which renders them incapable of doing the thing which they are most looking forward to.’ I’d swap ‘often’ in for ‘always.’ We don’t live in a world where you have to choose between Updike (nearly 30 novels, some great, some not) and Renata Adler (two perfect ones), but if we did I would prefer Adler’s. Then again, Updike is a sign that inner conflict itself isn’t required for refinement: He claimed to be a one-draft writer who simply abandoned projects if he didn’t think they were working. Ultimately, the question ‘How much?’ yields to the question ‘How good?’ We worry about whether writers are too prolific only because numbers are easier to talk about than words and what they mean.”