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Untold Secrets of Prolific Fiction Writers

2 www.writeadultfiction.com

In this special ‘Prolific Adult Fiction Writers’ Report you will meet ten of the world’s most successful authors and discover the strategies and productivity routines they use to achieve levels of success most writers only dream about.

We hope this Special Report will serve not only as an incredibly motivational roadmap to getting you on the path to your writing goals and dreams, but also as proof that, no matter what obstacles in your way, you can eliminate every one of them so you can control your time and get the most out of your days.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Mark Twain

Agatha Christie

Ian Fleming

Maya Angelou

John Le Carre

James Patterson

Stephen King

Tom Clancy

Malcolm Gladwell

J.K. Rowling

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MARK TWAIN

(SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS)

“You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s

adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

— Mark Twain, Author

In his trademark white suit, Mark Twain was noted for his articulate speech, witty remarks and mustache. How could a man so visually and orally impressive appeal to a young woman who was blind and deaf? Perhaps with his forthright honesty. “I feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake,” Helen Keller said of Twain.

He met her when she was 14 and they became lifelong friends. Twain eventually found funding for Keller’s education.

The two met at a lunch held for Keller in New York where she was more at ease with Twain than with any of the other guests. She later wrote, “Blindness was an adventure that kindled his curiosity. He treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.” Keller was a liberal, in favor of workers’ movements for better working conditions. Twain wrote, “I am always on the side of the revolutionists because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.”In 1889, when he was 23 years old, Rudyard Kipling

set out to meet his hero, Mark Twain, then 54. Twain, unaware he was to receive a guest that day, gave him a few hours — as much time as Kipling wanted. Twain had the calmest, slowest, most level voice in all the world and Kipling was awed by shaking his hand, smoking one of his cigars, and hearing him talk. “This man I had learned to love and admire 14,000 miles away... and he was treating me as though under certain circumstances I might be an equal,” Kipling said. Seventeen years later, when Kipling was famous, Twain read his books and loved them as Kipling had loved Twain’s. Rereading them every year Twain said, “In this way I go back to India without fatigue.”

Twain did not usually like to read fiction but preferred facts and statistics on any subject. He said, “Facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful.”

Incredibly for a professional writer, Twain only regularly worked four months a year but produced more than 50 titles including books, short stories, and lectures. But during the family’s vacation he worked five hours daily, five days a week, and tolerated no interruption. Twain’s family knew better than to disturb him when he was writing.


Twain provided himself with plenty of material through interesting jobs. He traveled “out west” and while there he worked as a miner. He traveled the world. When younger he worked on the Mississippi River, working his way up to river pilot. Twain’s younger brother Henry was killed in 1858, while working on a steamboat when boilers onboard burst. But Twain never wrote about that. If Twain indulged in therapeutic writing, he burned it or threw it away. None was found after his death; there were only some note-books with unfinished work that was reportedly not up to his usual high standards.

Twain refused a job because he was sure that the need to produce a column every week would soon leave him without ideas. To keep from getting bored, Twain worked on five or six books at a time. It took him several years to complete a book: Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper each took two or three years to complete and Life on the Mississippi took eight years. But Twain said the public deserved a rest between the publication of his titles.

He felt it was important to publish his best. Manuscripts lay around unfinished if he did not feel moved to work on them. When books remained unfinished, he sometimes reworked them into stories and sold them to magazines, changing the form to find a market. With popular characters like Tom Sawyer, he wrote sequels, which the public enjoyed. In fact, Kipling asked Twain in their meeting if Tom Sawyer would marry Becky Thatcher in a sequel. Twain said that he had not decided. Unfailingly polite and self-deprecating, his writing style was conversational, so that a century later his work is still fresh. He advised aspiring writers, “You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.”

Twain’s irrepressible sense of humor was always present, even when he was troubled. When Helen Keller visited his home after it had been burglarized, she found a card on the mantle, which advised future burglars where valuables could be found in the house. Twain explained that it was so that burglars would not bother him once they had broken in.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens wrote under the pen

name Mark Twain (1835-1910). Twain was born and died in the years when Halley’s Comet passed near Earth. He said, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”

William Faulkner called Twain the “Father of American Literature” and Ernest Hemingway declared, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain, called Huckleberry Finn.” Huckleberry Finn was first banned in 1885. Thomas Edison said, “An American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.”


sadness.She was an excruciatingly shy woman, always avoiding publicity, yet she became one of the world’s top-selling authors of all time. Her titles have sold more than four billion copies and her work is translated into 103 languages, only slightly fewer than the Bible and Shakespeare. She was always avid to have her works made available through new media, so her books have been made into movies, board games, audiobooks, and even computer games.

She is the author of over 80 novels and short stories and creator of world-famous detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. And Then There Were None has sold over 100 million copies worldwide, making it the best selling crime novel of all time. Christie’s play “The Mousetrap” showed more than 8,800 times during 21 years; it holds the record for

the longest unbroken run in a London theater. She wrote romance novels under the pen name of Mary Westmacott.

AGATHACHRISTIE

For eleven days in 1926, the world pondered a great mystery: Agatha Christie, a hugely popular mystery writer had disappeared without a trace. Had she been kidnapped? Had she been murdered like a character in one of her books? There seemed to be no clues.

The search by more than 1,000 British police was unprecedented. Airplanes were used in a manhunt for the first time. Hundreds of her civilian fans tried to track her down. Fellow mystery writers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers, were recruited, hoping their expertise would help in the search. News of her disappearance was of international interest and the tabloid press went wild with speculation.

Eventually, a musician at the fashionable hotel where Christie was staying recognized her and reported it to the police. Christie her-self had no memory of what had happened or how she got there.

The year 1926 had been a successful one for her professionally, with her sixth novel selling well and her popularity high, but had been a bad year personally. First, her mother died. Then, while she was grieving this death, her rather unsympathetic husband, Colonel Archie Christie, revealed that he was having an affair with their mutual friend, Nancy Neele. Christie’s disappearance and amnesia seem to have been a reaction to all this overwhelming

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your taste, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your

actions.”

— Agatha Christie, Author


Born Agatha May Clarissa Miller in Devon, England, to an American father and an English mother, she was homeschooled. She was married to Archibald Christie. In 1930, 40-year-old Agatha and 26-year-old Max Mallowan, an archaeology professor, married. Christie was made a dame of the British Empire in 1971.

Christie was disorganized in her surroundings, but well orga-nized in her head. She began her day by searching for her notebook. She would write in whatever notebook she found. She often had five or six notebooks going at the same time. Any novel or play might be distributed over multiple notebooks and many years. She made attempts to organize the notebooks, but always gave up after only a short time.

Christie never had a regular place or room where she wrote. She often used the dinner table because it was steady. This was a source of frustration to reporters who usually wanted a photograph of her at her desk.

Christie used the concentration involved in typing or writing to help her keep on track. By 1930, she had begun to write straight onto her typewriter, although she still did the beginning chapters’ longhand. She found a Dictaphone destroyed her concentration.

About the work of writing, Christie said, “There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.”

Christie would take long walks alone across Dartmoor to mull over her plot ideas. She said her dialogue out loud during these walks. Her prolific mysteries became a formula, but she varied it with the puzzle of the details. This was also spiced with a bit of understated comedy and satire. By the 1950s, it took Christie only about two months to write a book and another month to revise it before sending it to the publishers.

Christie ate apples while in the bathtub to ponder plots. She also mulled stories while washing dishes by hand.

She made lists of possible M.O.s, culprits, and victims, and then picked the combination that pleased her, much like Clue, a board game based on her work.

Christie studied people around her to help her define her characters. She noted physical appearances of strangers in public and would use their likeness and mannerisms to write realistic characters for her mysteries. She said, “Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.”

Usually when Christie started writing her books, she didn’t know who the murderer was.Christie disliked violence.

“I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest,” Christie said. Regarding her ability to “grind out” the large number of stories, she said, “I’m a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine.”


interview with Playboy. “He’s a sort of amalgam of romantic tough guys, dressed up in 20th-Century clothes, using 20th Century language.”

Fleming was born to a wealthy family in London. He was educated at Eton College and then abroad in Germany and Austria. He worked for Reuters News Agency where he enjoyed the pace and the work. Afterwards, he worked briefly as a stockbroker before becoming the assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence during World War II. This job would eventually become the inspiration for many of Bond’s adventures. After the war, Fleming became the foreign manager at The Sunday Times.

He drew on absolutely everything in his life for his stories. His love for ornithology, for example, gave birth to Bond’s name, a moniker stolen from the author of a book on Caribbean birds. The incredible details in the Bond books are true to life and Fleming enjoyed ensuring there were plenty to keep the reader interested. Because of Fleming’s position in the war and in society, he was able to incorporate firsthand knowledge of secret service agents.

“I’ve known quite a number of them,” he once said. “On the whole they’re very quiet, peace-loving people whom you might meet in the street, (or) sit

IANFLEMING

Ian Fleming didn’t start penning his James Bond series until 1952. He was 44 years old at the time. After years of experiences, Fleming found the time and space in which to create the notorious James Bond. Fleming continued to write the novels — one a year — until his death in 1964. During that time, he also wrote the short story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

for his young son, and two works of nonfiction.

The James Bond series inspired eight other authors to pen their own versions of the character’s story, a young James Bond series, and a series based on Bond’s secretary, Moneypenny. The character has been adapted for countless films since 1962, making

the James Bond franchise the longest running and third-highest-grossing film series to date.“Bond is a highly romanticized version of anybody, but certainly not I, and I couldn’t keep up with him; I couldn’t even at his age, which is, and always has been, in the middle 30s,” Fleming once said in an

“I sit in my bedroom and type about 1,500 words straightaway, without looking back on what I wrote the day before. I have, more or less, thought

out what I’m going to write and, in any case, even if I make a lot of mistakes, I think, well hell, when the book’s finished I can change it all.”

— Ian Fleming, Author, Journalist & Naval Intelligence Officer


next to them in your club — in fact, two of three do sit next to me in my club.”And that is what Fleming attempted to capture in Bond, a nondescript everyday man, with a wild life.

“I wanted my hero to be an entirely anonymous instrument and to let the action of the book carry him along,” Fleming said. “I didn’t believe in the heroic Bulldog Drummond types.” Fleming didn’t just utilize his experiences during the war and his knowledge of secret service agents,

but also his knowledge of languages, details of cities to which he’d traveled and in which he had correspondents placed. He would often ask the foreign correspondents that worked for him about train schedules and local geography.

“The main reason is that these things excite and interest me,” Fleming said. “I’m observant, I think, and when I walk down the street or when I go into a room, I observe things and remember them very accurately.”

Fleming was a well trained and an expert journalist, which he used to his advantage, constantly taking notes on everything including colloquial dialogue.

“I’ve just written down something I picked up in Istanbul the other day,” Fleming said. “Now there is no more shade.” This is a Turkish expression, used when a great sultan, like Mustafa Kemal, dies. I write things like that down and often use them later on in my books.”Fleming saved all these experiences, thoughts, and minutiae. For two months of each year he traveled to Jamaica, where he would write his novels.

During WWII Fleming went to Jamaica for a U

boat conference. While there, he fell in love with the Island and vowed to return. Just before marrying, he purchased 15 acres of land on the Northern coast and built a small cottage he called GoldenEye, a name he borrowed from one of many secret missions he ran during the war. In a nod to Fleming, GoldenEye also became the name of the first James Bond film that was not based on his works, released in 1995.

As part of his contract with The Sunday Times, Fleming was granted January and February as

holiday. In those two months, he would write one novel. Carving out this space among the tropical birds, plants and ocean that he loved, was essential to unlocking Fleming’s creative streak.

“Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it,” Fleming once said.

The day-to-day life Fleming lived in Jamaica was crucial to the speed with which he wrote. He woke, “with the birds because they wake one up,” he said. This was generally around 7:30 a.m. Then he would go to the water and take a swim.

“We don’t have to wear a swimsuit there, because it’s so private,” Fleming said. “My wife and I bathe and swim a hundred yards or so.” After their swim, they would return to the house and have breakfast.

“A marvelous proper breakfast,” according to Fleming. “With some splendid scrambled eggs made by my housekeeper, who’s particularly good at them.”

After breakfast, Fleming was in the habit of going and laying in the sun for an hour or so, until about 10 a.m., after which he would go in, close the doors and shutters, and sit at his desk.

“I sit in my bedroom and type about 1,500 words straightaway, without looking back on what I wrote the day before,” he said. “I have more or less thought out what I’m going to write and, in any case, even if


I make a lot of mistakes, I think, well hell, when the book’s finished I can change it all.”Fleming believed that his writing speed was necessary in order to attain the narrative speed he was after in his novels.

At around 12:30 p.m., he would return to the ocean with a snorkel and a spear to take a swim and look for lobsters, “or whatever there may be.”

Then he would come back to the house, “I have a couple of pink gins, and we have a very good lunch,” Fleming said, followed by a siesta until 4 p.m. After another sunbathing stint, Fleming would spend from 6-7 p.m. writing another 500 words.

“I then number the page, of which by that time there are about seven, put them away in a folder, and have a couple of powerful drinks, then dinner.” Every aspect of Fleming’s life enabled him to be as productive and prolific as he was. He depended on his training as a journalist for his observant eye and quick writing. He mined his memories for plot lines and details to make the stories and the character of Bond intriguing to the audience, and he built himself a retreat and took the time, in order to escape from the rest of the world and pen his novels. Fleming combined experience, space, and ritual to write 10 books in as many years and create a cultural icon.


The glass of sherry usually comes at around 11 a.m. after a morning’s worth of writing, but sometimes it comes earlier, Angelou once said.

Angelou kept a hotel room in every town in which she ever lived.

“I’d rent a hotel room for a few months,” she said. “I never allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there.”

She would remove everything from the walls and anything else that might personalize the space.

“I don’t want anything in there,” Angelou said. “I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended. Nothing holds me to anything.”

Around 12:30 p.m. or 1:30 p.m., Angelou would go home and relax. Sometimes she’d run errands, and then she’d prepare the evening meal and have a nice dinner. She would look at her day’s work after dinner and take a blue pencil to it, she said. “That’s the cruelest time of day,” Angelou said. “To really admit that it doesn’t work.”

She said that if she wrote nine pages that day she might be able to save two and a half or three.

She was also never one to back down from a challenge, encouraging others as she went through life to make her better at whatever she was attempting. In writing, she strived always to find the

MAYAANGELOU

Maya Angelou’s arsenal of published works is certainly a testament to her productivity. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry as well as a list of plays, movies, and television shows. And she was, indeed, productive throughout her entire life; with occupations running the gamut from fry cook to foreign correspondent.

She was an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In her lifetime, she received dozens of awards and some 50 honorary degrees. She was also a civil-rights activist working with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and she lectured well into her 80s. In the second half of her life, writing became Angelou’s focus and she established a specific routine to aid her creative process. Every day she awoke early and left the house around 6 a.m., driving to a non-descript hotel where she kept a room. She would lie on a made-up bed with a bottle of sherry, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, yellow pads, an ashtray and a Bible. The function of the Bible, she said, was inspiration.

“The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful,” she told The Paris Review. “I read the Bible to myself... just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.”

“All great achievements require time.”

— Maya Angelou, Author, Poet & Civil Rights Activist


best language she could for the work.

“It must look easy,” she said. “But it takes me forever to get it to look so easy.”

Angelou also said she found writing hard even after 20 or so books, but she didn’t back down. Rising to the challenge, she wanted to create something that told the truth and that someone would want to pick up again and again to learn something different from every time.

She took her life as seriously as her writing. She said that every human paid the earth to grow up. “Most people don’t grow up,” she said. “It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older.”

But she strove to grow up and to write about that. “It’s serious business,” she explained. “And you find out that what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth... That’s what I write.”

All of Angelou’s experiences and successes are based on the idea of challenge.

“I somehow got the feeling early on that if human beings did a thing, I could study it and try to do some of it too,” she said. While she never knew what she would someday become, she also never doubted her capabilities.

“I’ve listened to an inner voice and had enough courage to try unknown things,” she said. “And I think, everything in its time.


Le Carré’s childhood was dominated by his abusive, con-man father, who would “pat you on the back and reach into your pocket with equal sincerity,” le Carré once said. It was in this home that a young le Carré started making up stories to entertain, fantasize, and escape from reality.

While le Carré prefers not to share too much information about his time in MI6 with journalists, his novels draw heavily on his experience. “I don’t think that I spooked around for more than seven or eight years, and that was 40 years ago,” le Carré said. “But it was my little university for the purposes that I needed later to write. I think that if I’d gone to sea at that time I would have written about the sea.”

His messy childhood also seeps into his novels as much as his life as a spy. Many of his characters are based on people he met at various times in his life. His character of Jim Prideaux from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has the outline of a schoolmaster at one of the schools where le Carré once taught. The child in the novel was a little boy who le Carré once stopped from jumping off a 40-foot-tall banister in the school. “I just went and scooped him up,” le Carré recalled. “He didn’t jump. And when we were alone I said, Why did you do that? He said, I just can’t do the routine. I can’t make my bed. I can never make it to class promptly. Everybody teases me.”

These experiences have given a wealth of material to le Carré and he continues to research deeply and draw from every part of his life.

JOHNLE CARRÉ

Many in the media have branded him the spy who became a writer, John le Carré (Born David John Moore Cornwall) actually prefers to think of himself as a writer first and then a spy. His pseudonym however, was necessary because the British government, although supportive of his writing career, required it. Although his cover has been blown for quite sometime, le Carré lived in rel¬ative obscurity for years and his pen name has successfully kept the public at bay. His first novel, Call for the Dead was published in 1961, and he’s published 21 works of fiction, three non-fiction, a variety of short stories, three screenplays, was the executive producer of three films based on his novels, and appeared in the 2011 film adaptation of Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. Le Carré was named one of the 50 greatest British authors since 1945 by The Times of London and in 2011, won the Goethe Medal.

“I am a liar,” he’s said. “Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.”

“To give the best of the day to your work is most important.”

— John le Carré, Author


Le Carré wrote his most famous book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in just six weeks. He was

stationed in Bonn and going to Berlin often. He woke up early — between 4-5 a.m., and wrote on his lunch breaks. For later novels, he wrote on his daily one-and-a-half-hour train ride bound for London.

Le Carré says that giving your best time is the most important in

accomplishing a task or goal. “To give the best of the day to your work is most important,” le Carré said. “I was always very careful to give my country second-best.”

Le Carré writes in small notebooks and always has. Everything is handwritten and typed out by his wife. He spends time with scissors and a stapler while revising, literally cutting and pasting his stories together. Handwriting, he says, really allows him to see where his plot is going.

Le Carré is an extremely private person, never sharing much with the press, and keeping his fans and public at bay as much as he can. He has lived for the past 40 years in St. Buryan, Cornwall, U.K. He owns a mile of cliff close to Land’s End where he enjoys taking solitary walks. “Writing is the whole of life,” he said. “It’s the imaginative world in which I live.” He says he populates the hills and fields with his characters and plots.

Interviews and public appearances take him out of that creative world and he doesn’t like that.

“I love to sit somewhere and observe,” le Carré said. “I love to be a quiet guest at the dinner table and not show off.”

This is where he draws his creative strength, from his family, his solitude, and his ability to observe.

“I know I’m fluent, I know I’m a performer, but my performance has got to be solitary and confined to me.”

The private world that le Carré created and shared with the public is the place he’s gone to work through the pain of his child-hood, the confusion of his years as a spy, and his thoughts on the world that came out of the Cold War. He makes sense of his ideas, his pain, and his disappointment through his writing. He takes time to create, creates space to think, and depends heavily on his experience to remain productive.

“It was from there that I began abstracting and peopling my other world, my alternative, private world, which became my patch, and it became a Tolkien-like operation — except that none of my characters have hair between their toes,” le Carré said.


sure of. And if you’re having a hard time finding that confidence? Patterson suggests lying.

“Lie to yourself,” Patterson advises. “Tell yourself you can do this. Tell yourself your book will be great. The world will love it and you’ll be the next J.K. Rowling, J.D. Salinger, Art Spiegelman, or whatever flavor of author you hope to become.”

Doing anything with the productivity that Patterson has with writing, requires a strict work ethic. He created his as an advertising executive and continues the practice in his writing life.

“The trick is making writing into a daily habit,” he said. “Same time. Same place. Same hot beverage of choice. Every. Single. Day. Again. And. Again.”

Patterson maintains his schedule even on holidays.

“I pretty much write seven days a week, 52 weeks a year,” he said.

He gets up around 5:30 a.m. and straightens the house a bit, and maybe gets a little writing done. Usually he outlines and plans his day. Around 7:00 a.m. he walks around a golf course for an hour or so by himself. Afterwards he heads to his office where he writes until lunchtime. The main feature in Patterson’s office is a giant sleigh bed on which he writes surrounded by stacks of manuscripts.

JAMESPATTERSON

Arguably the most prolific writer of our time, James Patterson publishes at least three books a year and has been the top-selling author in the world for the last 14 years. In order to maintain that kind of uncommon productivity, Patterson sticks to a strict schedule, isn’t afraid to collaborate, and has created systems to ensure the work gets done.

In order to consistently produce that which his publishers have now come to expect and depend on, not to mention an incredible fan base, Patterson always maintains his confidence. While it seems to come easy for him now, that wasn’t always the case. Patterson won an Edgar Award for best first mystery when he was 26.

“Even though I knew I won, on the night of it, I was worried,” he said. “I felt like there might have been a mistake. That’s the kind of lack of confidence you can have early on. You’re writing this thing and you hope people like it. You’re rewriting and rewriting and get lost in the sauce. Confidence is a big thing.”

But, Patterson maintains that in order to keep going, one has to maintain the confidence in something.

“I have confidence that I’m going to be able to tell a good story,” he said, and that’s what keeps him going. Forgetting about the critics and not obsessing about the exact words, he finds strength in a talent he is

“The trick is making writing into a daily habit. Same time. Same place. Same hot beverage of choice. Every. Single. Day. Again. And. Again.”

— James Patterson, Author


“There are currently 50-60 manuscript piles,” he once told an interviewer. “Those are all live projects. So it’s a lot of writing.”

He drinks orange soda and only writes with a pencil on yellow legal pads. He chews bubble gum once a day. Finding a schedule, a place, and habits help to enforce the productivity.

The other thing that helps keep your work ethic in check is a support system.

“Don’t do it alone,” Patterson said. “If you live with somebody, tell them to be unpleasant to you if they see you doing anything else during your writing time. If you live alone, have friends call and check on you. And if you have no friends, you will have no trouble... What else do you have to do? I’m not knocking friendless people. We’ve all been there.”

James Patterson has been called the Henry Ford of the publishing world. He revolutionized the way novels can be produced in the way Henry Ford created the assembly line for creating automobiles. And for Patterson, this has been the key to his productivity. Patterson writes short sentences, short paragraphs, and short chapters. The style works to keep the books moving at a fast clip and keep the reader turning the page.

He also collaborates, but based on a habit he formed while in advertising, he never works with anyone he hasn’t carefully vetted.

“Patterson has built a kind of studio system in which he can imagine these stories into being, then work with co-authors so that these stories come into the world,” said Michael Pietsch, Patterson’s former editor (who is now CEO of Hachette Book Group).

What Patterson gives to his collaborators are detailed outlines that he expects to be followed with precision. These are also the outlines that lead to the books he writes on his own as well.

“I’m a fanatic about outlining,” Patterson said. “It’s going to make whatever you’re writing better, you’ll have fewer false starts, and you’ll take a shorter amount of time.”

Patterson writes and rewrites his outlines the way

some revise their novels.

“I’ll write a long outline, anywhere from 60-80 pages, and pretty much every chapter is dealt with, at least 80 percent of the chapters,” he said.

He always takes constructive criticism and believes that two heads are better than one — another thing he learned in the business world. He especially liked working on women’s projects, he said, because sessions with female copywriters were more collaborative.

Finally, his system relies on having multiple projects working at one time.

“I never get writer’s block,” he said. “I always have a good dozen projects that I’m working on, so if something isn’t working I’ll just switch gears.”

Patterson’s life is nothing if not productive. But his productivity doesn’t sacrifice craftsmanship, creativity, or story. Every one of his novels sells as well as the one before. He’s well aware of his audience and works hard to provide them what he knows they want. He doesn’t take the criticism that he is too mechanical to heart because he knows that his novels fulfill a need and are loved by his fans.

“When people actually come up in my office and wander around here, looking at 40 manuscripts lying around, they see that it’s an artist’s studio, and all this stuff about it being a factory goes by the wayside,” he said. “They see how involved I am in these things, and what a maniac I am... If it’s a factory, it’s a factory where everything is hand-tooled.”


day before to get back in the right mind frame, and then he writes. He completes his goal, usually before noon and then reads, edits, and prints off the pages he’s happy with so he can start fresh the next day. He takes no breaks in this process — not even for holidays. He’s even been known to take his computer to base-ball games to write during commercial breaks and pitching chang-es. Only when a novel is finished does King allow himself a break.

“I make myself stop completely for 10 days or 12 days in order to let everything settle,” King told Rolling Stone. “But during that time off, I drive my wife crazy.”

Every day is the same. “I wake up. I eat breakfast. I walk about three and a half miles,” King said. “I’ll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I’ll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.”

This habit has been established since King was working as a teacher and trying to support a small family. While he didn’t get to write in the morning, King would come home, feed his kids, play with them and put them to bed, and then sit in a little laundry room at a child-sized school desk and write until his wife, Tabitha, came home from her shift at

STEPHENKING

In 2015, President of the United States, Barak Obama awarded Stephen King the National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to litera¬ture. He has published more than 55 novels, six works of nonfiction and some 200 short stories.

But King will tell you he never had a choice.

“As a young man, my head was like a crowded movie theater where someone has just yelled ‘Fire!’ and everyone scrambled for the exits at once,” King wrote in and Op-Ed for The New York Times. “I had a thousand ideas but only 10 fingers and one typewriter.

There were days — I’m not kidding about this or exaggerating — when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane.”

The kind of prolificacy that King embodies depends on a cease-less imagination, but also upon strict discipline.

“The key to productivity is consistency,” he once said. For most of his life, King has written 2,000 words, or approximately 10 pages, every day. He starts between 8-8:30 a.m. by reading what he finished the

“I’ve written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side —

I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”

— Stephen King, Author


Dunkin Donuts.

The discipline has continued even after he was struck by a minivan and almost killed during one of his walks in 2001. And the discipline didn’t change even while he was heavily addicted to cocaine and alcohol.

These habits have multiple benefits. For King, they keep him regulated, productive, and now sober. They also keep his creativity at its sharpest. He says his imagination is extremely well trained and like an athlete that takes time away, it is difficult for him to stop being creative.

“It hurts to imagine stuff,” King said. “It can give you a headache. Probably doesn’t hurt physically, but it hurts mentally. But the more you can do it, the more you’re able to get out of it. Everybody has that capacity, but I don’t think everyone develops it.”

King’s habitual nature created his drug and alcohol addiction as much as it created a library of work. But it also helped him to get sober. He still smokes cigarettes he said — three a day and only three a day. He says he kicked booze, Valium and cocaine, but he couldn’t kick cigarettes.

“I sure do like to kick back with a good book and a cigarette,” King said. “I was lying on the bed reading The Quiet American by Graham Greene. I’m smoking a cigarette, and I’m thinking, who’s got it better than me?”

King prides himself on being strong, ambitious, and determined. This is part of what kept him

successful as a writer and a family man even in the throes of addiction. But kicking those habits was essential to continue to be successful. He believes the last novel he wrote before he was able to get sober, The Tommyknockers, is one of his worst. Another of his least favorites is

Dreamcatchers, which he wrote after his accident and while heavily medicated with Oxycontin.

He entered Alcoholics Anonymous and dedicated himself to his sobriety the same way he dedicates himself to his work. He believes in God and asks for help and forgiveness as is taught in the AA program.King refers to this as a meditation point and a source of strength.

“I choose to believe that God exists, and therefore I can say, ‘God, I can’t do this by myself. Help me not to take a drink today. Help me not to take a drug today.’ And that works for me.”

But he remains ambivalent about the way of God and doesn’t subscribe to a particular religion — and that uncertainty also works for him.

“I think uncertainty is good for things,” King said. “Certainty breeds complacency.”

In order to produce the amount of work he’s created, it is necessary to love it.

“I’ve written because it fulfilled me,” King said. “Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side — I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.” And he plans to. King doesn’t think he’ll ever retire fully from writing, although he admits to slowing down with age.

“Writing is a wonderful thing to be able to do,” he said. “When it goes well it’s fantastic, and when it doesn’t go so well, it’s only OK, but it’s still a great way to pass the time. And you have all these novels to show for it.”


of a book. Although Clancy didn’t start writing immediately, the dream remained at the forefront of his mind. He went to college and studied English, graduated, and married.

He then went to work in the private insurance office started by his wife’s grandfather. He was successful enough to purchase the business from his mother-in-law and began running it himself. Eventually, though, he came back to that dream of seeing his name on the cover of a book, and so began working on The Hunt for Red October. He worked, he said while at the office a couple of hours a day and in the evenings and on weekends at home.

“Nothing is as real as a dream,” Clancy said during a commencement address to the 1986 graduating glass of Loyola University. “The world can change around you, but your dream will not. Your life may change, but your dream doesn’t have to.”

In order to pursue a dream, one must have the courage to take a risk.

“The only way to avoid risk is not to do anything,” said Clancy. “And that method of avoiding risk also carries a price that you are avoiding success as well. Not taking the chance, not trying, not going after

TOMCLANCY

Not many writers can claim the President of the United States as one of their biggest fans. When Tom Clancy’s first book, The Hunt for Red October

came out in 1984, it was given to President Regan as a Christmas gift. Soon after, on national television, the President said it was “un-put-down-able” and a “perfect yarn.” From then on, Clancy was a success.

Through a signature combination of courage, determination, and hard work, Clancy

penned 19 more works of fiction and 11 of nonfiction over the next 30 years. When he died in 2013, he had seen his creations turned into numerous movies and video games, hobnobbed with presidents, and made a name as an active participant in children’s charities.

In order to be truly productive, Clancy relied on a deep well of courage. From the time he was in high school he dreamt of seeing his name on the cover

“Writing a book is an endurance contest, a war fought against yourself, because writing is beastly work which one would just as soon not do. It’s also a job, however, and if you want to get paid, you have to work. Life is

cruel that way.”

— Tom Clancy, Author


your dream, that’s something to be afraid of.”

It’s that same courage that took him to the U.S. Naval Institute with a copy of The Hunt for Red October. He dropped off the manuscript just as the Institute was entering the publishing business.

“A few weeks later, the publisher expressed interest, and so, I’ve never had a rejection slip,” Clancy once said. He was given $5,000 for the book and soon after landed a $3 million three-book deal with Putnam.“Of course, fortune does favor the brave,” Clancy said. “In battle, you forgive a man anything except an unwillingness to take risks.”

But having a dream and the courage to try is only one part of the process. A person must also doggedly pursue his goal, and Clancy was tireless in his pursuit.

“I tell people the most important talent in writing is persistence,” Clancy said. “That’s probably the most important talent in anything — persistence, sticking with it, seeing it through, not giving up. If you do that, in a society like ours, chances are you’re going to succeed.”

In order to maintain the persistence and productivity, Clancy always remembered his dream and believed in it, and in himself.

“You’ve got to believe in what you’re doing,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that a person does not risk his life very often for things in which he or she does not believe. The reason you put it on the line is because you think you’re making the world a better place for having done so.”

Clancy believed that it was his persistence above all else that contributed to his success.

“Persistence is probably the most important of the virtues,” he said. “Because unless you stick with something long enough to learn how to do it, you’re just not going to accomplish anything.”

Clancy recognized that true productivity is impossible without hard work.

“Writing a book is an endurance contest, a war fought against yourself, because writing is beastly

work which one would just as soon not do,” Clancy said. “It’s also a job, however, and if you want to get paid, you have to work. Life is cruel that way.”

This work ethic led Clancy to research tirelessly. He knew every detail about the workings of the gadgetry and weapons mentioned in his novels, and they are also historically and politically accurate. He talked endlessly to the people he wrote about, he said.“You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf,” Clancy said. “You do it, (and) keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired — it’s hard work.”

Clancy’s unique combination of bravery, determination, and work ethic produced a library of work that most writers can only dream about. Not only was he profoundly prolific, he was also extremely financially successful. His novels spawned movies and video games encouraging the media pantheon “The Clancyverse.” Clancy took the dream of being a writer and succeeded in telling his stories in whatever way was most entertaining in the moment. And this was, for him, something to be deeply proud of.

“Fundamentally, I’m in the entertainment business,” Clancy said. “My function is to take (people) out of their lives and put them somewhere else where they can vicariously experience another life.... That’s an honorable tradition.”


a few hours at his home in the mornings, he travels among his favorite various New York City haunts; he is in a constant state of observation, experiential collection and organization, and theorizing. He admits that several times a year, he spends a day in the periodicals section of the New York Public Library scanning through hundreds of medical and psychological journals; he’s looking for patterns, and seeing what new ideas might contain anecdotal resonance. His process — paring down information

intake to tune out the static and make fast, sound decisions — is called “thin-slicing” and was popularized in his book, Blink.

Gladwell’s personal discipline and systematic disposition no doubt subsidize his fascination with success. His father has

MALCOLMGLADWELL

Optimistic. Innovative. Obsessive. Unconventional. Malcolm Gladwell’s insightful self-proclaimed mission is to translate academic work for a popular audience. He’s an observer. A deliverer of anecdotes. A game-changer. Gladwell himself is the ultimate “connector,” bridging disparate universes; the New York literary world and corporate America; liberal and conservative; men and women; high and low. In spite of his academic underachievement as a child, Gladwell’s discipline and innate drive to analyze and understand the human experience has afforded him a career as a journalist, bestselling author, speaker, and the honor of being on Time magazine’s list of “100 Most Influential People.” He acts with intention. He is judicious and detail oriented. He is methodical in his research, personal observations, lifestyle, and routines. He spends every Sunday morning reading the newspaper while enjoying some tea and eggs.

As a former 1,500-meter rival of Canadian record holder Dave Reid and lifetime, disciplined runner, he does one or two six-mile runs a week in Central Park or Prospect Park. He also does Cross-Fit one day a week, then one or two days of intervals; he always runs when he travels. Gladwell doesn’t like desks and confesses to not sitting still all that often. After

“What I try to do — try to be — is unafraid of making a fool of myself. I don’t mind changing my mind. The older I get, the more I’ve come to understand that the only way of pursuing valuable things and saying

valuable things is if you lose your fear of standing corrected.”

— Malcolm Gladwell, Journalist & Author


described him as “eaten up with competitiveness,” and his quest to understand the nature of performance and ultimate manifestation of success among the human population led to his bestselling book, Outliers.

A common theme among Gladwell’s work and interests is the question: What makes exceptional people exceptional? His simple answer to the question of what is critical for success is three-fold: capabilities, desire, and passion. Additionally, when asked about his personal success, Gladwell explains, “What I try to do — try to be — is unafraid of making a fool of myself. I don’t mind changing my mind. The older I get, the more I’ve come to understand that the only way of pursuing valuable things and saying valuable things is if you lose your fear of standing corrected... I’m provoking people to think.” Essentially, attitude is everything.

In diverse contexts and dynamics, Gladwell’s ability to transform the vague and undetermined is in his attitude and what he calls “habits of mind.” He believes and personifies the reality that attitudes are as critical to success as particular skills or resources.

He repeatedly contends that being “massively open (willing to consider new and unusual ideas), conscientious (capable of following through with one’s ideas), and highly disagreeable (able to tune out the naysayers) is critical.” An inclination of rebellion against the status quo is also necessary to be successful.

Gladwell’s first assignment at The New Yorker was to write a piece on fashion. But instead of writing a glossy expose concerning the world of high fashion, as was expected, Gladwell chose to write about a man who manufactured low-priced t-shirts. His confidence and aptitude for intentional dissention has not only catalyzed a different way of thinking among his readers, but has also “helped create a highly contagious hybrid genre of nonfiction, one that takes a nonthreatening and counterintuitive look at pop culture and the mysteries of the everyday.”

Gladwell continues to examine and revolutionize the conventional and predictable ways that people think, behave, and interact. His purposeful design of a lifestyle with meticulous order, disciplined optimism, and intellectual openness grants him the freedom to not only pursue, but also live his work.

He genuinely enjoys the company of others, but resolutely lives alone — another penchant that upholds his profession and obsession. A close friend remarks, “For Malcolm to sit down and work for five hours solid and then make himself a cup of tea, that makes him the happiest man in the world.”


novel, her mother died, and Rowling was devastated. She poured her depression and her anxieties into her novel and eventually rediscovered her happiness.

“I was not the world’s most secure person,” Rowling told Oprah Winfrey in a 2010 interview. “In fact I would say I was someone with not much self-belief at all, and yet in the one thing in my life, I believed. That was the one thing in my life. I felt, ‘I can tell a story.’”

But the ability to tell a story and create magical worlds is only part of Rowling’s much broader creative process. In order to truly create the novel, Rowling had to be a disciplined writer. From the time she first started working on Harry Potter up till now — Rowling has written nearly every day. Some days she writes a lot and sometimes not as much, but she sits down to write every day. Her process is simple. She writes everything long hand first, which acts as a first draft, and then she transcribes it into the computer, her second draft. After that, she goes through page by page to be sure that there are no holes and every loose end is tied up.

“I write nearly every day,” Rowling said in an interview. “Some days I write for 10 or 11 hours. Other days I might only write for three hours. It really depends on how fast the ideas are coming.”

All of this writing takes time and space. For Rowling, both are necessary to her productivity. When her

J.K.ROWLING

Harry Potter stepped out of J.K. Rowling’s head fully formed while she was stuck on a train between London and Manchester. Rowling’s single-minded ability to turn a daydream into seven books garnered as many films by the same name, theme parks in Harry’s honor, and legions of fans. But Rowling has proven herself to be far more than a one hit wonder. She is currently penning a second series of books under the nom de plume, Robert Gal¬braith. She’s also written a play and a screenplay, and is active in her non-profit, Lumos. She’s also a wife and the mother of three. Her productivity is unparalleled and enviable, but as she’ll attest, not a super-strength. In order to be as productive as she is, Rowling has depended on a deep-rooted faith in herself. As far back as she can remember, she wanted to be a writer.

“I wished to be published,” she said. “I wished more than anything in the world to be a writer.”

But her family wasn’t so supportive. As she entered University, her parents wanted her to study something practical, but she chose classics. Rowling said that she never even told her parents of her choice.

When she started writing the Harry Potter series, Rowling was at one of the lowest points in her life. She had just divorced her husband of two years and had an infant daughter. She’d moved from Portugal back to the U.K. in order to scrape a life together for herself and her child. Six months into writing the

“Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

— J.K. Rowling, Author


daughter and The Chamber of Secrets were both in their infancies, Rowling would take the baby for a walk and think about her novel. Once her daughter was asleep, Rowling would rush to a coffee shop and write as much as she could. In the evening, when the baby would go down for the night, Rowling would type her written copy with a typewriter. This process worked well for the first novel. As she became successful, Rowling continued to carve out similar spaces to work.

When she became successful and had more resources, she realized creating space to work was easier, but just as important.

“As I was finishing Deathly Hallows, there came a day where the window cleaner came, the kids were at home, the dogs were barking, and I could not work,” Rowling said. “This light-bulb went on over my head and I thought ‘I can throw money at this problem. I can now solve this problem.’”

She packed her things and went to the Balmoural Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland to finish her novel. Without intending to, she kept going back. “They were nice to me,” she said of the staff, and she finished the last of the Harry Potter novels there. While creating physical space in which to work is important, so too is creating the mental space to work. The amount of success and fanfare Rowling received through the Harry Potter franchise resulted in an enormous amount of pressure. There was pressure to finish the novels, ideas that the fans had, the desire to please them, but also the need to stay true to her own story. There were also endless press runs, and signings, and movie premieres. Rowling found it difficult to cope.

“At the time, I felt the need to deny how great the pressure was because that was my way of coping,” Rowling said. “I kept saying to people ‘yeah I’m coping, I’m coping.’ The truth was, there were times I was barely hanging by a thread.”

In order to staunch the pressure and get back to

writing, Rowling created Robert Galbraith to write the Cormoran Strike series. The mystery novels, were a huge divergence from the children’s books she’d previously written. Robert Galbraith was able to be something Rowling couldn’t at the time.

“Robert Galbraith felt like my own personal playground,” Rowling recently said. “Using a pseudonym felt like a private pleasure — no one knew I was writing Cuckoo’s Calling — I felt a sense of liberation, a different space.”

Finally, Rowling advises, in order to be truly productive, one must not be afraid to fail. “Failure meant the stripping away of the inessential,” Rowling said in a Harvard Commencement Speech. “I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to di¬rect all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me.”

This is where her single-mindedness truly comes from. When she was in the depths of poverty, scared, and alone, Rowling felt that she had truly failed and there was nothing left but success.

“Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged,” she said. “I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

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