Great, Excellent, Good, Fair, Mediocre

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.

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Great, Excellent, Good, Fair, Mediocre