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Author Quality: Last Novel May not Be the Best

Prompt: An author is only as good as their last novel. Do you agree?

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Well, not exactly, but commercially speaking, yes. The last novel’s popularity usually affects the next novel’s sales.

Artistically speaking, however, I would go with an author being as good as their best work. Not every major author is a natural, but each begins with a storehouse of material and memories that often temper over time. Authors have their own different natures and peaking times depending on their talents, education, and aspirations. Some are ambitious, while others lack the energy and dynamism to go after what is good for their art, or they are too dependent on the critics’ opinions. Critics’ words so unnerve them that some authors never talk about their work in progress.

Although, statistically, a good number of the authors in USA come up with their best work in their younger years, some write it much later in life, due to several causes, one of them being that they started off in other vocations and later took up writing, and therefore, evolving as an author took its time.

Even if authors may continue writing on after producing their best work, I would think they should be judged on what came out as the most literary from their pens. Yet, who is to say which work is better than another or which one is literary and which one is not? Each critic or reader has his/her own views on the subject. Even the popularity of a novel at its own time doesn’t guarantee its survival through the centuries.

When all is said and done, I think each generation has its own superior, good, or good-enough authors, but the longevity and the quality of any work is usually decided by the following generations and centuries.