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How Do Some Folks Produce So Much So Quickly?

Naughty_Felid said:
Two writers spring to mind

Micheal Moorcock - Eternal Champion series in the early 70's most books are about 180 pages long. He'd knock out a book a night/ a couple of days "On a bottle of Scotch"* - but I suspect other stuff helped him as well. You've got to say the quality was pretty good once he'd stopped focusing on funding his magazine.

Nick Redfern - writes huge amounts of stuff. He gets up at 6 in the morning and does 8 hours a day - writing. It's a formula and a very good work ethic. No matter what you think of the content.

I reduced hours a few years back temporarily, I needed to study and once I did I would do ANYTHING not to work or study. To the point where I went back to fulltime work to get my shit sorted.


During Covid my wife took over my mancave and turned it in an office - no problem if anything her productivity increased. It's not my space anymore it's an office. She doesn't need to travel.

She gets up and her routine is the same when she was at work apart from the travel - no fucking about. I don't know how she does it. I just want to arse about if I 'm at home. I can't do this work from home - I'll go and grab the remote for 5 minutes and watch Family Guy repeats again and again. I need to be at work hands-on doing stuff.



*I'm quoting from memory so could be wrong.
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I went to a convention dedicated to Fortean Biking Vicar, Lionel Fanthorpe. The blurb said that he had written over 200 books, which I assumed was books and booklets. He spoke of his days writing pulp SF where you were paid for quantity rather than quality. He said he could knock out a 40,000 word novel in a weekend, so 200 books doesn't sound too crazy.
 
Ogdred Weary said:
I went to a convention dedicated to Fortean Biking Vicar, Lionel Fanthorpe. The blurb said that he had written over 200 books, which I assumed was books and booklets. He spoke of his days writing pulp SF where you were paid for quantity rather than quality. He said he could knock out a 40,000 word novel in a weekend, so 200 books doesn't sound too crazy.
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I know - I have no idea how he does it! He is a very clever man.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I know - I have no idea how he does it! He is a very clever man.
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He made it sound like this was a relatively brief period in his youth and openly acknowledged that most of the stories were not very good, he would have to resort to all manner of nonsense to pad out the page count. I recall him saying having characters discussing philosophy for several pages was a regular trick, perhaps in a broken elevator or on a long space flight. He also managed to get a paragraph out of a character wondering whether a rock was pinkish grey or greyish pink.
 
Anthony Trollope, author of 49 novels on top of his day job at the post office, wrote from 5.30 to 8.30 every morning, allowing himself a minimum of 250 words every 15 minutes. He said of writers:

“Let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,—as men have sat, or said that they have sat.”

The answer is discipline.
 
Also don't forget that these days you can dictate type with quite a few programmes, which sounds like it would speed things up no end but actually you end up spending far more time editing, proofing, etc etc than if you'd just typed it in the first place.
Naughty_Felid said:
During Covid my wife took over my mancave and turned it in an office - no problem if anything her productivity increased. It's not my space anymore it's an office. She doesn't need to travel.
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I work from home a lot, so our spare bedroom is my office. It makes it much easier having dedicated workspace, as you can not only shut the door but you mentally associate that place with working, whereas sitting with your laptop at the dining room table very quickly stops being productive. Too many distractions. Having spoken with friends less accustomed to it they've all found the same things: dedicated space if possible, being fully dressed (in a couple of cases they put their work lanyards on, as that sensation helps them focus) , setting a routine and sticking to it, only having relevant browser windows open. All of which also applies to writing, of course.

As with Trollope above, a lot force themselves to write at least a set quota a day. If I'm writing stuff with a deadline I do that.

HA! No I don't. I piddle about with notes and odd paragraphs and chunks of prose for weeks on end then pull the lot together in a couple of days. I'm more like Adams (qv) than any other author in that respect. My mind's working on it all the time, but the actual commitment to paper is a last-minute thing - that said when I do start typing it's pretty much fully-formed and needs little tweaking.
 
stu neville said:
when I do start typing it's pretty much fully-formed and needs little tweaking.
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Do your conclusions surprise you when you set them down? I do have a reason for asking: my own working method for the 80 000 word research project I completed sounded very similar to yours: I'd fiddle about with bits here and there for a few months, and then write up a 10-15000 word chapter in less than a week. What astounded me was, although it almost always came out the way you described - i.e. fully-formed and requiring little tweaking - I found that it was only at this writing-up stage that I found out what I actually thought about the material I'd been pondering, and what conclusions I had drawn.
 
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Ladyloafer said:
James Patterson has stated he collaborates with other writers and they do the graft and he does the ideas.
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It does take a well coordinated effort to successfully misuse funds. Can't do it alone.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
Nick Redfern - writes huge amounts of stuff. He gets up at 6 in the morning and does 8 hours a day - writing. It's a formula and a very good work ethic. No matter what you think of the content.
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I've noticed he gets double value out of his work as well. The posts on Mysterious Universe appear in a similar form in the published book. It happens quite a bit with other authors even if they don't come out and say it.
 
I've done a lot of writing: magazine articles, club newsletters, etc., huge amounts of technical/legal writing in my old job, and one novel. The novel took abut 6 months from start to finish. I started writing about an hour a day then as I got nearer to the end, it became almost a 9 to 5 job.

The main thing is discipline. It's like riding a long distance on a bicycle: if you sit there and pedal for long enough, you cover the distance.

A useful trick I found was to start each writing session by re-reading the previous day's work and editing it, which got me into the mood and gave me a flying start to producing the next new bit.

It's extremely rewarding, but hard work.
 
Krepostnoi said:
Do your conclusions surprise you when you set them down? I do have a reason for asking: my own working method for the 80 000 word research project I completed sounded very similar to yours: I'd fiddle about with bits here and there for a few months, and then write up a 10-15000 word chapter in less than a week. What astounded me was, although it almost always came out the way you described - i.e. fully-formed and requiring little tweaking - I found that it was only at this writing-up stage that I found out what I actually thought about the material I'd been pondering, and what conclusions I had drawn.
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Often as not, yes. I've just finished a mag piece and it was only once I'd got it all out in a linear format I noticed some correlations which in turn informed what I thought about it.
Mikefule said:
A useful trick I found was to start each writing session by re-reading the previous day's work and editing it, which got me into the mood and gave me a flying start to producing the next new bit.
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Yeah, I do that, plus the old trick of finishing a writing session with the opening sentence of the next bit as a prompt.
 
One of the reasons I gave up on any idea of writing was that I'm a terrible over-editor of my own work, and have never quite worked out how to stop. There are many different ways to write the same thing - I get stuck on that, and can never quite be happy with the one I settle for.

Which means that when I do this...

Mikefule said:
A useful trick I found was to start each writing session by re-reading the previous day's work and editing it...
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...I'll often find that's all I've done.

When I was at university I know I had a very good grasp of style, because it was regularly commented upon. These days, when I look back at what I write, it just looks like a big jumble of stuff - I think I try to stuff too much baggage into too small a space, ending up with interminable sentences with too many distractions and asides.

Ah well, back to the day job. (Or not - just now.)
 
My own experience is in the wrtiing of fan fictions. (Fashionable to knock this and Sturgeon's Law applies - 80% of it is crap for lots of reasons. Once this has been filtered out and you are in the remaining 20%, this is where you find writing which is readable).

For me, apart from the experience of picking up where Terry Pratchett and others left off, it's been a practical learning process in characterisation, plotting, dialogue, structuring, et c - really getting into the nuts and bolts of how to write. It's also madly compulsive. When I'm in the zone it flows. Hardly any effort at all and a few hours later I'm looking at a 5,000 word chapter or short story.

Pratchett himself said you need to look at 500 finished words every day as a bare minimum. and that's every day, no exceptions, especially when the block is on. Can't say I'm there yet but it's good advice.

Having learnt the nuts and bolts via writing fan works, I'm turning over ideas for original stuff of my own that I might legitimately be able to offer to publishers.
 
Ladyloafer said:
Because they genuinely don't do it themselves.
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I genuinely do not want to believe this is the case with Tolkien and Adams - that will ruin me. So please do not compare masters with writers of soap operas!!!
 
I cant believe JRRT had Minions.

(Unless Chris counts and that was posthumous)
 
dejanmikic said:
I genuinely do not want to believe this is the case with Tolkien and Adams - that will ruin me. So please do not compare masters with writers of soap operas!!!
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Yeah possibly not those guys. I dunno. But they hardly churned out new stuff that often either.
 
dejanmikic said:
True - but at the high times they produced incredible volumes... I was just thinking how many hours were invested considering all the early drafts, abandoned stories, research.... mind boggling
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Some writers never do all those stages. The books come fully formed from their minds. Isaac Asimov was one such writer.
I wish I had that capability.
 
I suppose productivity is helped by not spending hours on sites like this one.

;)
 
It is surprising how much you can turn out when you're really 'in the zone'. I once wrote a short story that flowed out almost quicker than I could type, took less than an hour. ( it was accepted and published by a publisher I sent it to, so it must have been ok).

Unfortunately that was a one-off, everything else I've written has needed the time and vein-popping effort of a Boxing Day bowel movement.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I know - I have no idea how he does it! He is a very clever man.
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I heard Rev Fanthorpe describe his sci-fi novel writing process on a podcast once. He claimed he would sit with a blanket covering his head and dictate the story out loud for his wife to type up.

It obviously worked for him!
 
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Ogdred Weary said:
He spoke of his days writing pulp SF where you were paid for quantity rather than quality.
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I was going to mention Fanthorpe. As with drive-in movies, the pulp-fiction itself was very much a by-product to be smothered by genre-expectations and cover-art or posters.

Among "classic writers," the most prolific is said to have been Victor Hugo. I believe he arranged, while living, to have many volumes of his Collected Works published after his death. These included, iirc, the extensive results of his spiritualist sessions channelling other authors - including Shakespeare!

Taking of Spirit[ual]ism, Brazilian Spiritist Chico Xavier is said to have written over 490 books!

The fragrant Barbara Cartland wrote 723 novels! :actw:

Hugo, Xavier and Cartland had nothing very much in common apart from their longevity.
 
The apparent record holder for most prolific author is Charles Hamilton ...
Charles Hamilton

The London-born writer put pen to paper at a very early age and never set it down. Historians estimate he wrote a total of around 100 million words, most as short stories for magazines. If you divide that word count by the length of an average novel, old Charlie published the equivalent of about 1,200 books. That earns him the gold crown as the most prolific writer in history.

It’s often difficult to attribute work directly to Hamilton since he used over 20 different pen names throughout his career. Does Cecil Herbert ring a bell? T Harcourt Lewelyn? E.S. Turner? How about Frank Richards? That last one was Hamilton’s most-used nom de plume, and it’s also the one associated with his most famous creation, Billy Bunter. “Famous” if you were a boy between 1908 and 1940, anyway.
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SOURCE: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/6-of-the-most-prolific-authors/

Charles Harold St. John Hamilton (8 August 1876 – 24 December 1961) was an English writer, specialising in writing long-running series of stories for weekly magazines about recurrent casts of characters, his most frequent and famous genre being boys' public school stories, though he also dealt with other genres. He used a variety of pen-names, generally using a different name for each set of characters he wrote about, the most famous being Frank Richards for the Greyfriars School stories (featuring Billy Bunter). Other important pen-names included Martin Clifford (for St Jim's), Owen Conquest (for Rookwood) and Ralph Redway (for The Rio Kid). He also wrote hundreds of stories under his real name such as the Ken King stories for The Modern Boy.

He is estimated to have written about 100 million words in his lifetime (Lofts & Adley 1970:170) and has featured in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most prolific author. Vast amounts of his output are available on the Friardale website.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hamilton_(writer)
 
EnolaGaia said:
The apparent record holder for most prolific author is Charles Hamilton
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Wonderful stuff!

The penny-a-line market endures - I know folk who knock out endless stuff, supposedly non-fiction, for online clickbait mills.

Do they dream of a by-line one day? Or is that now out-of-reach? The conflict is played played out daily on sites, such as The Guardian, where freely-donated comments under-the-line are sometimes a lot more thoughtful and intelligent than the articles that provoked them.

Back in Regency & Victorian times, the public appetite for three-volume novels seemed endless. A flood of authors was recruited to fulfil the need. Untangling their identities, at this remove, is problematic but it can safely be presumed that many were female, as were the majority of novel-readers. Payment rates were miserable and the works were bought outright with no hope of royalties for a success!

Before that, there was Grubb Street . . .

While many people daydream about becoming authors, I am always reminded of Sam Johnson's stern warning about writing and money!

There was similar mad productivity in the early days of the gramophone. Some artists would dash between studios and record their current numbers under new names - for a few shillings a time. Some of them stayed productive for decades but they needed to! Others would dream about the fame and fortune they would have, if they could only make a record! :doh:
 
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At first I thought this article was about how often I need to use the loo. I'd swear much more comes out than goes in...

When I was younger, at university I could sit down at a computer and bang out a B grade or better two-page paper within a half-hour, usually starting about an hour before the paper was due. The advantage of a computer was the ability to go back to edit without having to re-type like I'd had to do in high school. Of course, often I "wrote" the article in my head for a while before; I still do the same when planning documents I need to write for work.
 
madmath said:
When I was younger, at university I could sit down at a computer and bang out a B grade or better two-page paper within a half-hour, usually starting about an hour before the paper was due. The advantage of a computer was the ability to go back to edit without having to re-type like I'd had to do in high school. Of course, often I "wrote" the article in my head for a while before; I still do the same when planning documents I need to write for work.
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I could do something similar when I was a student. In a day, I'd bang out a handwritten assignment that would get me a straight A.
Can't do that now.
 
I can pound out quite a bit when in the ‘zone’, but it was much easier before my partner and I became self employed and I could sit in silence for hours. Now, there’s always distractions. Silence and time seems to be the main thing. If you’re getting up to cook, do laundry, and try and write in between working, it’s a battle.
 
There is the possibility that one's production is related to one's family harmony.

Is this a permissible subject for discussion ?
 
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