I recently had a young scholar asked me what I could tell him about being more productive, and it reminded me that I once attended a lecture of a colleague's mentor who had written thirty books in about 40-plus years in the academy. Needless to say, I was both impressed and a bit dubious. Had he written twelve to fifteen books, it would have been easier to believe. Why? Because in my business you cannot simply sit in your chair and compose in your computer. You have to do research, test out your ideas, read a lot of secondary sources and find primary sources that have not been over used. You have to write conscious that other scholars will to try to prove you wrong. Then, you have to find a legitimate press that will take your work. I'm a pretty fast scholar and there have been times in which I have researched and written a book in about three years, but usually it is a book that jumps off a previous project, never one that starts from scratch.
To write thirty books in thirty or forty years means you have a stable of research assistants, a catalogued archive in your study room and unlimited research funds, or your sibling owns a university press. The fellow I mentioned earlier was from the University of Columbia and I don't think he had none of the aformentioned. Of course, he could simply have been a writing genius. There is a writer whose name escapes me at the moment who has written over 90 books and he still looked under 70 years old in the picture I saw of him. Now, while all writing requires some research it is likely that someone who is not worried about footnotes, bibliographies and academic standards is likely to be able to put out a lot of works. And if he or she makes a name for themselves most presses will consistently publish them because people buy books by popular authors and not necesssarily because of the subject or the quality. I know, there are a lot of unread books in my office from "famous" authors.
So how does one respond to someone that seeks to be more productive? My advice would be to write a good "first book". Most people who write a first good book open up a big door though not all walk through it. I don't think I've known personally anyone who has written a bad first book ever do much afterward in my field. It is not impossible and people who don't do well in their first effort should not give up, but it does make it harder. The first one will always lack some something, but it should never lack passion, an interesting topic and some flashes of good writing.
As I said in one of my earlier posts, it is important to understand what it takes to be a writer and for scholars or nonfiction writers, it means learning the demands and standards of their field. It is hard work as is the craftsman's and the artist's. It is a daily pursuit and there are no short cuts. And--this is important--there must be a lifelong passion for the written word. If you don't love to write as much as it pains you to do so, you will never be good at anything that entails or truly demands writing.
Writers should be prolific and they should try to publish their work but I don't believe that overwriting and publishing for the sake of having a long resume is the mark of a good writer. In recent years, especially with the rise of e-books I have found outfits--I don't know what else to call them--that "teach" you how to write a book in a weekend and get it published online. They are what I call "piece-it-togethers" who actually tell you that people aren't looking for quality just information. Writing is a such a difficult process and so is getting published that people in droves pay significant amount of money to "publish". But it does not make them writers. If that was the case all those tv pundits and politicians who "write" books--most of which are written by staff or ghost writers--would have the right to call themselves writers, but they don't. They don't spend the time looking up sources, writing and rewriting sentences and paragraphs, rereading their work and dumping those sections or all of the manuscript because it doesn't work, and starting over.
Writing, as I have often said, is about hard work. People who write a book a year can rarely muster that much good to say. In my profession three to four books in thirty years is consider a good career if you add articles, book reviews, teaching, leading study abroad, and other collaborative efforts. Five to seven books are considered really good and anything above that is a different shade of excellence, though by then you are probably talking about closer to a 40-plus-year career. All of this, of course, depends on the quality of the book. My goal was ten to twelve books in my lifetime --I started writing books in my late 30s--but only seven of them were to be scholarly works. Only time will tell if I get there given that I now want to write poetry, short stories, plays and essays. But surely I will never get to thirty books.
Here is a tip I ran into on writing schedules.
http://www.bgsu.edu/downloads/provost/file14107.pdf
