DJ Taylor: There comes a time when even Stephen King has said it all

'Broadly speaking, the older and more successful a writer gets, the worse his books become'

It would be an exaggeration to say that the literary world has been rocked to its foundations by the hint that Stephen King, the "sultan of schlock" and author of more than 60 best-selling novels, is contemplating retirement. Even so, King's telegraphic forecast of what lies in store at the close of his latest US mini-series ("Then that's it. I'm done. Done writing books.") will have had a publisher or two looking nervously at his profit and loss account – Simon & Schuster, perhaps, who paid him $17m (£12m) for Bag of Bones back in 1997 – and thousands of fans staring forlornly into an imaginative well whose level can now, alas, only recede.

You may not like Mr King's work, with its demonically possessed automobiles and paranormal bloodbaths, but by God he shifts books.

As for the reasons behind this graceful departure from a lucrative and decades-long career, one looks for the traditional politician's and sportsman's excuse about wanting to spend more time with your family, only to realise that in this case it doesn't apply.

Writers get to spend plenty of time with their families already; this is one of the givens of authorship. Mr King, it turns out, still recovering from a car accident three years back, is worried by his inability to break new ground. "You get to a point where you get to the edges of a room and you can go back where you've been and basically recycle stuff," he recently told the Los Angeles Times. "Then you have a choice. You can either continue or say 'I left when I was still on top of my game'."

However saddening or otherwise this news, one ought to start by congratulating Mr King on his courage. The number of best-selling novelists who recognise their tendency to repetition and resolve to do something about it is all too limited. Industry-wide acceptance of the King principle might have spared us countless works by – well, it would be invidious to name names, but I once went through a novel by Jack Higgins noting down the references to the weather, a Higgins trademark – and came up with enough data to fill a meteorologist's logbook.

At the same time, King's worries about the habit of the average novelist to start repeating himself at a certain point in his career, to reach a plateau from which there can be no further ascent, have an application altogether beyond the narrow world of schlock lit.

Most literary lives, inspection suggests, take the form of a parabola in which the downward curve is implied in the upward: youthful promise, combined with a certain amount of waywardness; solid mid-period achievement; slow decline. Thus James Joyce starts off with the short stories of Dubliners, breaks the bank with Ulysses and finally, long years later, ends up with the riot of self-indulgent wordplay that is Finnegans Wake.

Practically any literary, and quite a few musical and artistic, careers fit this pattern, if rigorously enough applied. Significantly, the process is nearly extended by what might be called the reverse parabola of the writer's income. Broadly speaking, with a few honourable exceptions, the older and more successful a writer gets, the worse his or her books become. As it is one of the great unwritten laws of literature that a novel for which a publisher has paid £10,000 is nearly always better than one that is worth £100,000, the artistic parabola can only complete its descent.

To this habitual falling-off – at a guess the real creative period in most artistic lives lasts between 15 and 20 years – can be added the fact that, just as painters and musicians return inexorably to the same subjects and tonic clusters, so writers have a habit of exploring the same themes. It is no disparagement to the compendious oeuvre of Anita Brookner, for example, to say that her 20 or so novels are actually only the same novel written in 20 or so different ways.

Even in the realm of characterisation, novelists have their favourite types – Dickens's languid young men, Wodehouse's heavy fathers – to which they unwaveringly track back. I once suggested to the late JL Carr that the heroines of his various novels were, in effect, the same woman. Carr owned up immediately.

If there is a way out of the King dilemma, it is perhaps to stop trying to invent new plots and situations – King was apparently alarmed by the reappearance in his work of the spooky car, in this case a haunted Buick Eight – and simply write about your own life, thinly disguised, and the people you know. In most of the post-war era's best novel sequences (Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, Simon Raven's Alms For Oblivion) authorial stamina has been helped by the feeling that this is a real world silently refashioned into fiction.

Consequently, if I were Mr King, I'd start writing a book about a fiftysomething horror novelist who is knocked over by a minivan and forced to re-evaluate his life. It might lead to something big, and would certainly make a change from paranormally charged Buicks.

davidjtaylor@btconnect.com