“Prolific” just means producing a lot. But when people call a writer prolific, they usually mean more than volume. They mean a large body of work that people actually read. By that standard, a handful of writers stand out, and their habits are surprisingly ordinary.
The record setters
Isaac Asimov wrote or edited around 500 books, ranging from the Foundation science fiction novels to guides to the Bible and Shakespeare. He typed fast, worked most days of the year, and kept several projects going at once so that when he got stuck on one he could switch to another.
The Belgian novelist Georges Simenon wrote close to 200 novels under his own name, including 75 featuring Inspector Maigret, plus hundreds more under pseudonyms. He often wrote a novel in a week or two of intense, daily sessions.
Anthony Trollope wrote 47 novels while holding a full-time job at the British Post Office. In his autobiography he described getting up early, writing for three hours before work with his watch in front of him, and aiming for 250 words every quarter of an hour. When he finished a novel with time left in the session, he started the next one.
What they have in common
- A fixed time. Most prolific writers write at the same hour every day, often first thing in the morning, before the rest of life gets a vote.
- A quota. Trollope counted words. Stephen King, in his memoir On Writing, describes aiming for around 2,000 words a day.
- Several projects. Being stuck on one thing is less paralyzing when there is another to work on.
- Finishing. Prolific writers publish imperfect things and move on. Revision matters, but endless revision is how books never get done.
Start small
You do not need to write 500 books. Three hundred words a day, before breakfast, is a hundred thousand words in a year, the length of a decent novel. That is how most prolific careers start: not with a burst of genius, but with a habit that refuses to skip a day.
Sources: Isaac Asimov, Wikipedia; Georges Simenon, Wikipedia; An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope, Project Gutenberg; On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Wikipedia.
