COMPULSION: The Writers Who Wrote The Most in History · brennan.day

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'Padre Sebastiano' by John Singer Sargent, ca. 1904–1906. Original from The MET Museum. | Rawpixel (edited by the Author)

As regular readers of my blog know well, I enjoy navel-gazing and writing about writing. I consider myself a specimen of curiosity just as I do any other topic I write about.

Being someone who has decided to write so frequently and publicly, I've gone over the throughlines and various thesis topics I've discovered I gravitate towards, I've gone over my workflow from idea to publishing, I've gone over how each day of writing is both a wishing paper crane and message in a bottle I'm sending out.

There are mornings I sit down at this desk and mechanical keyboard and I don't know what I'm about to write. I just know that, by the time I stand up in an hour or so, there will be roughly 2,000 more words on brennan.day than there were the hour previous. And tomorrow, there's a good chance that there will be another 2,000 words, and then the day after that.

This has been going on for, give or take, seven months now. Over 430,000 words on this blog, posting nearly every day. In this process, a second skeleton has been built underneath my first. Created out of the marrow of compulsion to keep writing things down in public.

At this point, there isn't an option.

The difference between a writer and an aspiring writer is not knowledge, talent, merit, or anything like that. It is the act of writing. And so I've decided to take a look at other writers throughout history who have had it even worse than me. Writers who have an even more eyebrow-raising output.

Most of these writers history keeps as a cautionary curiosity—can you believe how much that author produced?—as though volume were a circus trick instead of the entire shape of a life.

I went looking for what shape their mornings had. Their tea and typewriters. Their guilt and how their bodies gave out underneath of them. I researched because I wanted to know what it looked like, hour by hour, to be so compelled to write.

The Dictating Giant

I'll start with G.J. Chesterton, who wrote around 80 books, hundreds of poems, 200 short stories, and roughly 4,000 newspaper essays. The American Chesterton Society points out is equivalent to writing an essay per day for eleven years straight. He did this while being a rather chaotic person—Chesterton stood at 6"4 and nearly 300 pounds, perpetually late. He once telegrammed his wife from the wrong city to ask where he was actually supposed to be. While he couldn't be trusted to find the right train platform, he certainly could be trusted to write.

His schedule was to rise late, dictate to a secretary for a couple of hours before lunch, attend to business, take a walk, dictate again in the afternoon, and then work alone late into the night, well after everyone else had stopped. The public, cigar-smoking version of Chesterton holding court in restaurants and train stations was real, sure. But so was the private Chesterton compulsively writing at his desk at midnight, fully unwilling to be done.

His secretary, Dorothy Collins, was who actually wrote out everything he dictated, and became a sort of surrogate daughter to him. Collins was present for the many hours of dictations and went on to manage his entire literary estate after he died in 1936.

Chesterton's entire body on Thomistic philosophy reportedly began with him skimming the top book of a stack Collins checked out of the library, and then he simply started to talk. No outline or second pass, just trust in the engine. The resulting book on Aquinas is regarded as one of the best, according to actual Thomistic scholars.

Sometimes the fast, undisciplined draft is the real thing. But it certainly takes thousands of attempts to get to a place where that's a possibility.

The Romance Machine

Corin Tellado published more than 4,000 novels and sold over 400 million copies, mostly under a contract with Spanish publisher Bruguera, which obligated her to deliver a 76-page novel every single week for years. Tellado did not have the luxury of waiting for inspiration, as she was running a small industrial operation out of her typewriter. She was writing while under Franco-era censorship, which made the eroticism the romance genre is known for completely forbidden. And she turned that constraint into a craft, later saying the rejected drafts taught her "to suggest more than to explicitly show". She made technique out of the limitations of what she was allowed to write. Romantic lemonade out of banned erotic lemons, if you will.

Tellado is quoted as saying that she'll only stop writing when her "head falls on the typewriter". That's a person who has fused her identity so completely with the act of writing...