Great, Excellent, Good, Fair, Mediocre

[desiresjab]

Another thread got me thinking. The word great is overused in everything. I reserve it here only for top of the line writers in the high canon, the ones you expect to be around a hundred and fifty years from now and still going strong.

I don't care who is where, I only want to know how it is done.

Some writers are quite good, perhaps popular, but from the start their work will never make the high canon. Others, like Ray Carver, seem to head right for literary immortality with an unrelenting bead. Why is that? How is that?

Say one cannot think of any books about wagon trains that make the high canon. I think that means no one has done a good enough job yet. If Saul Bellow or Hemingway had decided to write a book about wagon trains, there probably would be such a book in the high canon.

Carver had the target. He knew where he was best. He figured out he was not a novelist.

In the end is it mostly about talent, even if progdgious work is put in?

Let's say you know you have risen to good. You have no problem thinking you are an excellent writer, either. In fact, though you will keep it to yourself and never say it, you feel you are a great writer capable of the canon.

Someone still has to allow you to prove that, don't they? Even if they allow it, they may not understand the proof. In fact, they probably will not, if past is precedent.

[Danik 2016]

The question is maybe how an writer becomes canonical on an universal basis. No one would put in doubt the greatness of Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Cervantes, Dante, Walt Whitman, Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, Clarice Lispector...and some others.
The ironical Borges suggested a survival time (more modest than yours) of the grand works of 50 years.
Anyway I think it is the art of capturing an historical moment through a meaningful content expressed in an original way. But that is not saying much.

[Dogbird]

hard work. Gets it done!
Sometimes like on race day the pack ignores great writers and drafts behind someone that the masses appreciate more than you.

[desiresjab]

I wonder, has a vanity press mill from the 20th century onward ever published in fiction:

1 A bestseller
2 A canonical work

This does not include established writer deciding to self-publish, but new authors?

I think masses of people are flocking to sites like Amazon and Lulu and dumping their stuff into the market for 99 cents, sometimes less. I am reminded of hundreds of thousands of hatchlings, only a few of which might survive to maturity.