It’s a word that comes under some fire, and the common dismissals go like this: If you write so much, how can any one book or song be truly meaningful to you? Or: It sounds like you’re more interested in having finished a book than you are the actual book itself. Or, this: With all your stuff, I don’t know where to begin. But what the Prolific understands, deeply, is that you can start anywhere in a Prolific’s catalog and work your way in either direction from there. For us, that’s a thrilling prospect, and it’s not unlike “prospecting” insomuch as, either way you dig, toward the earlier work or along the path of what followed, you’re always looking for similar gold. What the Prolific cherishes above all things is not the singular work of art but the canon. The oeuvre. The arc of a creative mind unable to stop itself, the waves created by endless ideas. Have I mentioned that the Prolific believes anything he or she does, at any time, is a snapshot of the whole? That to wait years between projects is akin to having misplaced a thousand photographs from an era that, in hindsight, was much cooler than it felt at the time?

Who wants to miss out on those photos, that time?

I bring this up here for a reason.

The rough draft for Bird Box was written in a twenty-six-day frenzy in October of the year 2006. At the time, and certainly when I started it, it was only the next story to be written. I had the image of a blindfolded mother, two blindfolded children, navigating a river. Nothing more. Where were they going? What were they fleeing? Why couldn’t they…look? All these questions were answered as I went; what began as a possiblity became blood, sweat, and fears, and it’s the closest I’ve ever come to reading a book as I wrote it. And the spirit of such a thing, the idea that I ought to write every day, to get the story done, to add another book to the growing stack of drafts in my office, was unquestionably born of the philosophy of the Prolific. Like the band Guided by Voices and people like Alfred Hitchcock, there was a sense that to stop, to slow down, to (gasp) wait for inspiration, was the equivalent of creative death. You can easily picture the imagination standing on the edge of a cliff, alone, eyeing the abyss below, weighing whether or not to leap. Because the Prolific knows, above all things, that the artist can’t be expected to know which of his or her works are the good ones, which might resonate with other people, and certainly not which idea would be done best when plucked from the field of growing conceits.

Nothing scares the Prolific more than an Idea Graveyard. Not even the ones for the bodies.

So why not write…everything?