What is the most anyone has produced in writing?

[Cheezy the Wiz]

That's how I occasional feel with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It's worse than Lord of the Rings.

What? Twenty Thousand Leagues practically read itself for me! I just skipped some of the pages where he was rambling off scientific names of coral, but the rest was great!

Now Kate Chopin's The Awakening, on the other hand, was about a hundred pages, and I couldn't suffer through it.

 

[stormerne]

Do you feel the person misses out on actual life by living so much in literature?

It's not how I/we feel about it; it's how you feel about it. What is the purpose of your "actual life"? Does it have one? Do you want it to have one? If so, does literature help you with that purpose or finding that purpose, or does it get in the way? Only you can answer those questions.

Also, do you feel that for a work to be "complete" it has to reach a number of pages, numbering in the thousands? Or does it not matter in your view?

No. A true artist knows when to leave alone. And a true artwork, that lasts forever in the public's mind, is never complete in any way. Once an artwork is complete, it is already en route to being forgotten. Save completed artworks for the also-rans.

 

[Kyriakos]

How? I mean, when you write stuff, does it just flow out of you, or is that basically what you do in your free time?

I think that most of the problem of writing something is actually deciding to sit down and write. The rest is not that difficult, once you have had some practice.

Personally i am lazy, and my publications made me even lazier fast... But i can write 10 pages in thirty minutes, if i decide to actually write.
Once i wrote 300 pages in two weeks, so around 20 a day, and in theory i could write up to 50 pages a day (if i do nothing else that day that is). So it is not impossible to reach 10K pages in 7 years.

I think that most of the trouble with writing a lot is that you have to hit a nerve, so to speak. Then you just want to express yourself.

No. A true artist knows when to leave alone. And a true artwork, that lasts forever in the public's mind, is never complete in any way. Once an artwork is complete, it is already en route to being forgotten. Save completed artworks for the also-rans.

Well, a work can never be complete anyway, in reality, since it would be like saying you have completed writing down all of the numbers that exist. You can generalize a lot, use infinity symbols, use definitions such as "narural numbers", but you could never write all of them in any more presentable way. And then of course the mind is a lot more complicated than just a number progression.

But i think that some degree of volume is needed for a work to be seen, on the whole, as classic, if one seeks to have a more overall view of humanity by it. Sure there are classics which are very small, such as Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw, but that is just a short story, not an insight to life. Besides, "everything is complicated, because it reflects the universe, whose main characteristic is complexity" as Borges wrote.