What I Learned Writing 100 Books

Installment #5

Aug 28, 2024

This series’ first installment suggested why you might just be crazy enough to write 100 books. The second installment suggested how you might get there, the third for whom to write, and the fourth how to get there without stumbling too badly. This fifth installment addresses some practices that will keep stoking your writing fire. To get to a hundred books, you’ll need a lot of fuel. Here are some tips on fuel sources.

Writing Other Things Helps Book Writing

It’s strange but true: writing other things may help you write more books. You might think otherwise, that you’d better put all your eggs in the book basket or you’ll never get to a hundred books. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true. That’s certainly not been my experience, nor the experience of some other prolific book authors.

I, as one prolific book author, have written a lot of other things besides books. If I had to guess, I’d even say that I’ve written far more other things than books, going by word or page count. Across forty years of law practice, I wrote a ton of correspondence, contracts, court papers, and other materials. Across nearly twenty years of teaching law, I wrote a ton of lessons, outlines, worksheets, quizzes, exams, and other teaching material. I now write a ton of online content for law firms. Yet all that other writing didn’t seem to deter my book writing. Just the opposite: it fed book writing, giving me the skills, confidence, materials, and urgency to write books. I’ve been too busy not to write books.

I am not unusual in that respect. Anthony Trollope, among the most prolific of book authors of all time, did much of his writing while in full-time government service, as a postal clerk among other roles. He would write on the train as he traveled around first Ireland and then England on his official business. His travels and postal work fed his book writing. Legend has it that he would even dip now and then into the post office’s lost-letters files for writing material.

It may just be that to get better at something, you need to do a lot of it. To get better at book writing, you may just need to do a lot of writing, whether of books or other materials. Don’t hesitate to take on other writing assignments. They may feed rather than deter your book writing.

Reading Other Things Helps Book Writing

Reading other things besides your own books also helps with your book writing. You can’t write the same thing over and over and expect success, although many writers try. To write more books, you need more subjects, more ideas, and more insight. For that inspiration, you need to be thinking not just alone but with others. You need others to feed you information, share their experiences, and spur your insights.

So, if you’re going to write a hundred books, then read a thousand. For a time, while teaching, I kept a list of the books that I had read. I had to do so because I was finding that I was forgetting the books I had read and ordering them a second or third time from my assigned staff librarian. But the list surprised me at how quickly it grew. I was reading a hundred books a year.

Now, readers have different ways of reading books. Some books, I would read word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and page by page. Those were the best books, so packed with insight that I feared to miss a single word. Depending on their length, they might take me a week or two, or even a month. But I found that most books had only occasional nuggets, maybe a chapter here or there, or even just a good introduction, insight, or conclusion. My eyes might run over most or all of the book’s pages, but only skimming, looking for that nugget. If I found one, then maybe I’d read more. But if not, then on to the next book.

In that manner, I’d read-review a half dozen books over a weekend, holding onto only one or two to read throughout the week. And as I read, I’d be collecting thoughts and citations in whatever book or books I was then drafting or hoping to draft. Feed the bear. Keep reading when you’re writing.

Listening to Good Content Helps Book Writing

These days, listening to good content can also help feed the bear of book writing. Podcasts and Youtube channels have opened the door to a great wealth of literary, scientific, philosophical, and other thought. You may not have time to read a special author’s latest 500-page work. You may not even be able to afford to acquire it. But you’ll probably find the author speaking online in some forum, or if not, then others speaking in some online forum about the author.

Of course, the advantage to listening to good content to help stimulate your book writing is that you can do so while doing other things that occupy your body and hands, like walking, running, riding a bike, mowing, driving, cooking, or laying sleepless in bed in the middle of the night. You can save your eyes and pocketbook but still invest in your own education and inspiration. In that respect, we live in quite a rich time. I gain much of my material on some book subjects from what I’m learning online.

Park Your Ideas Somewhere

The challenge becomes what to do with the inspiration you’re gleaning from reading and listening to other good content, to turn it into books. As I’ve already briefly mentioned above, my main practice is something like the parking lot method used during oral presentations or in workshops. The moment I discover something of value in my reading or listening to good content, I record it in notes right below where I am currently writing on my next book draft, or if the draft already has a well-enough developed outline, then wherever the thought belongs in that outline.

The parking lot means that I constantly have material to work into my books, right where I need it. If my mind runs dry, I simply look down the page to the parking lot, usually finding something there that I need and want to work into the manuscript. If I find nothing in the parking lot and have nothing in mind, then it’s time to take a break from book writing anyway. I’ll go read some good material or listen to some good content, and bingo! I’ve got fresh material again, either from the content or drawn once again out of my own spirit and mind.

Keep moving cars in and out of your parking lot. Keep refreshing your writing. Keep learning and growing. Don’t write the same book a hundred times. Instead, write a hundred fresh books, each building in some way on the other. Don’t be the same writer when all done with your hundred books that you were when you wrote your first one. You want your readers to grow and learn, too. To help them do so, you’ve got to learn and grow first, to draw them along with you.

That’s all for now in this series on what I learned writing a hundred books. Let me know your thoughts. And thanks for the interest. May you set a writing goal that challenges you and inspires you to learn and grow. And may you reach that goal, at just the right time, in just the right way.