One masterpiece or prolific writer?

[Daphne]

Margaret Mitchell wrote one brilliant book - Gone with the Wind. Harper Lee wrote one book To Kill a Mockingbird. Alexandre Dumas wrote 277 and Enid Blyton 600! Which are you - single masterpiece or prolific? (or somewhere in between!)

[kookoo88]

I prefer prolific.  I don't know that any of my books will be masterpieces but I hope they're fun to read. 

I wrote and published the one book this year and I'm almost done with the first draft of book two.  I'm hoping to write three next year.  That's in addition to the full time job and family.    Sleep is optional, no?

[KerylR]

I often wonder about the one hit wonders.  Did they only really have one story in them?  Or did they do so well on the first one that they didn't want to risk following it up with a stinker?

Heinlein talks about how there's no such thing as a retired writer.  We keep going until we physically can't do it any longer.  That fits the writer's I know a lot better than the one masterpiece technique.

Granted,  I don't actually know anyone who wrote a masterpiece first time out.

[Daphne]

KerylR - Re. one hit wonders - I believe that Harper Lee was so overwhelmed by the success on "To Kill A Mockingbird" that she chose a reclusive lifestyle and not to publish more books. With "Gone with the Wind" - it is such a huge, wide ranging work, it may be that there was just that book in Margaret Mitchell, although I do recall reading somewhere that she was killed in a road accident in her forties, so it may be that she might have written more had this tragedy not occurred. I wonder with someone like J K Rowling - who is a one hit wonder in the sense that her books are all continuations of the Harry Potter story - whether she will write other novels, or whether her initial success would be too hard an act to follow?