From Quartz:
If there’s one word to describe Isaac Asimov, it’s “prolific.”
To match the number of novels, letters, essays, and other scribblings Asimov produced in his lifetime, you would have to write a full-length novel every two weeks for 25 years.
Why was Asimov able to have so many good ideas when the rest of us seem to only have one or two in a lifetime? To find out, I looked into Asimov’s autobiography, It’s Been a Good Life.
. . . .
Growing up, Asimov read everything:
All this incredibly miscellaneous reading, the result of lack of guidance, left its indelible mark. My interest was aroused in twenty different directions and all those interests remained. I have written books on mythology, on the Bible, on Shakespeare, on history, on science, and so on.
. . . .
It’s refreshing to know that, like myself, Asimov often got stuck:
Frequently, when I am at work on a science-fiction novel, I find myself heartily sick of it and unable to write another word.
Getting stuck is normal. It’s what happens next, our reaction, that separates the professional from the amateur.
Asimov didn’t let getting stuck stop him. Over the years, he developed a strategy:
I don’t stare at blank sheets of paper. I don’t spend days and nights cudgeling a head that is empty of ideas. Instead, I simply leave the novel and go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap. I write an editorial, or an essay, or a short story, or work on one of my nonfiction books. By the time I’ve grown tired of these things, my mind has been able to do its proper work and fill up again. I return to my novel and find myself able to write easily once more.
Link to the rest at Quartz
His method of working–having multiple projects always going–is how I work, too. And yes, I can attest to the fact that it helps me be productive. I don’t waste time “blocked.”
He probably wouldn’t be too popular with our KDP-dominant writers of today.
He jumped around between genres, he wrote short works, he wrote what he felt like.
Many of those practices have been frowned upon by ‘those that know how to sell.’
Strange, though – many that sell today I’ve never heard of, probably never will. But everyone’s heard of Isaac Asimov.
Well, it was a different age.
For the first decade of his career there was no such thing as a true Science Fiction book market. Just the magazines and the odd limited edition. FOUNDATION’s first edition had a low 4-figure print run.
For the first 30+ years of his career, a student of SF could reasonably aspire to read all the SF published in a given year.
Early on a lot of his output diversity was necessity as much as inclination. There were plenty of others who played the same game, L. Sprague DeCamp notably wrote a great history of ancient engineers. Robert Silverberg had a hundred pen names. Richard Matheson migrated to script writing…
To be a professional writer in those days you had to write…anything. Everything. Whatever you could sell.
As late as the 60’s he did a work for hire novelization of FANTASTIC VOYAGE.
Today you can specialize if you’re so inclined but in those days you couldn’t be too picky.
Two things that distinguished Asimov from his peers was that he could tap the textbook market and that he practically never used pen names.
There are many things to learn from a successful writer. As a science fiction writer just knowing the science is not enough, and an expanded knowledge of other subjects is very important. Some of my science fiction stories didn’t come from science at all, but from my interest in other subjects. The broader knowledge you have the better off you’ll be, writing.
As for what to do when you’re stuck, stopping and doing something else is a good suggestion. In my opinion when you’re creating you’re channeling information from somewhere else. And occasionally the source needs to be replenished or gets clogged. Give it time to fill the reservoir again.
Excellent article. It’s always fascinating to get a glimpse of how great minds work. Every piece Asimov wrote, fiction and non-fiction, displays his intellect, his boundless curiosity, and big heart.
He certainly epitomised the WIBBOW principle. 🙂
I am also a voracious reader with broad interests from childhood. My parents never told me what to read or not read, and neither did any librarian I ever knew. I don’t have his education, nor dedication, but he put out a huge volume of work that wasn’t trash. I could only hope to do as well as he did.
Also, my brother worships at the feet of the Foundation series.
**He was a genius-level smartie, which helps to write in various areas.
**He preferred being in his room writing away than anything else (and I recall hearing complaints about that from the Missus), typing away from 7:30 in the am to 10:00 at night. (I bet anyone who dedicates most days of the week to 12+ hours of writing can get a lot of output, though being a genius would help, too, since his brain was very active.
**He was educated in science and loves science fiction, and those two mesh well, so he could write in both areas (science/SF).
I was maybe 9 when I first read something of Asimov’s (it was my sister’s borrowed book,some anthology or collection. I don’t recall the book itself, but the story was “The Ugly Little Boy.” Later, when I became hooked on SF at 16, I read the FOUNDATION books and was so delighted. I read NIGHTFALL AND OTHER STORIES and THE GODS THEMSELVES and the I,Robot stories, plus others.
Sad that HIV took him. Miss those sideburns, those bolo ties, and that sense of humor. Isaac was nerdy-cool.
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov
Foundation was my first exposure to the good doctor.
Third SF book I read knowing it was SF. (Verne and Wells I read without knowing their role in the genre.)
I made an effort to read everything of his I could find. Took me a while to run into OPUS 200 and realize the enormity of the task.
It’s been a while. I need to get an e-copy to read, as I have some hardcovers that are pretty yellowed. 🙁
I found the link inspiring, PG. Thanks for posting it.
As a university professor, he would have been fairly prolific at producing course materials. In the early days of pulp fiction, you either wrote a lot or starved.
I remember that an Astronomy Primer of his I picked up in the school library and read through in two days triggered a life-long love of both space and non-fiction reading in me.
It wasn’t until much later that I discovered his Robots, and Foundation and Empire series, and fell in love with Space Opera.
His book about nuclear science and the history of physics taught me far more than my classes in school did. Yes, some of that book is now dated, but the basics of how fission reactions work and how a reactor works? Still solid. And the illustrations were great.
The main thing I took away from Asimov’s science books was that science is the process of stepwise refinement. Each step is good enough for its purpose, most of the time. It’s just out at the bleeding edge where things are a teensy bit fuzzy.
What I took from them is that science is fun.
Science Fiction even more so.
I remember a cartoon in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine of the mutton-chopped maestro himself reading a headline that Stephen King was taking a sabbatical and exclaiming, “Finally the rest of us will get a chance to publish something!”
I remember reading an Asimov nonfiction book about the history of ancient Greece. It was pretty interesting.
Isaac Asimov was the best school teacher I ever had.
Dan
I’ve seen this statistic before and wondered, how many of those books are still in print, or available at all? How many of them are all that worth reading? Where did they go, and why did they go there?
Some of the non-fiction was science popularization and very dated by now. His textbooks, too. But his guides to SHAKESPEARE and THE BIBLE are enduring scholarly works.
Of his fiction, the mysteries survive as period pieces so they should endure well past their copyrights. His SF was almost all Golden Age and later so except for a few stories where he was actively trying for a hard science approach (notably the LUCKY STARR series) they mostly seem to be aging well. A lot of it is that he wrote mostly short form and didn’t do much near-future extrapolation. Most of his prominent SF is set in the far future.
Add in that his style was lean and terse and melodrama-free and the only real cues to the stories’ age is the social conventions underlying them. Very accessible storyteller. He should remain readable for a couple more generations, at least.
(That said, maybe 10% of his fiction books is anthologies and compilations with a fair amount of duplication. A “Complete Asimov” would only be about 400 books worth. 🙂
A lot of his books were for children, such as the “How Did We Find Out?” 32-book series, which were shorter — about 60 pages — and did not require much in-depth research from someone who had been immersed in these various subjects.
He also repackaged his monthly essays into books.
He was also a very hard worker, spending long hours in his upstairs office and doing what he could in the evening while watching TV.
They also forgot #7: Ignore Your Family.
Definitely ignore your family. Your on your own boys and girls.
Most of his popular science books are dated now. But they’re still just as useful and relevant now as they were then, because Asimov usually started from the very beginning and gave you the background of who and why as well as what.
If Asimov wrote a recipe for mud pies, it would spend a hundred pages on dirt, and then move on to “water, which has some interesting properties…” And you’d know mud pies inside and out.
Such thoroughness also ruins the reader for normal textbooks, which simply present masses of information to be learned by rote, isolated from any historical background.
Also Asimov did a ton of anthologies with Martin H. Greenberg. Marty put the books together through Teckno Books, Asimov did the introduction. Asimov counted those in the 500 as well.
He did far less than 100 novels in his day, including his young adult books. But he did a lot of nonfiction and essay books and less than a hundred short stories that he put in collections. He counted them all for the 500 total, which is fine, he should have.
Basically he published over 500 books with his name on them. He didn’t write 500 novels. Not even close.
I remember someone referring to Dr. A as a corporate authorship…as if he was a proto-type James Patterson. 🙂
Dan