The Man Who Wrote Ten Books a Year

And what he has to teach us about achievement today.

What’s It Like to Have the Writing Superpower?

Robert Silverberg's a science fiction author. But he always sounded to me a lot more like a science fiction character.

Silverberg started selling short stories when he was in his teens, and soon started selling enough to make a living, then to make a good living. He kept it up for sixty years.

By his own account he could write and sell up to fourteen stories a week. In his thirties he slowed down enough to churn out novels at the rate of a dozen or more per year. Some of those novels were hailed as masterpieces. Are they? Eh. Not really. But they are pretty good, and people used to say they were masterpieces, and Silverberg pumped them out at three times the rate most people read books. That's still a pretty amazing achievement.

In his late thirties, while dealing with health problems and personal crises, Silverberg announced his retirement from writing—and subsequently went on to publish several more multi-part series, multi-part prequels to those series, regular magazine columns, a memoir, twelve standalone novels, and over a hundred more short stories.

Silverberg wrote so much that it's hard to get a clear sense of what exactly his output was like. He used around fifty-seven separate pseudonyms and wrote erotic novels, crime fiction, history, and literary criticism along with his science fiction. Legend has it the magazines of the fifties were half full of pieces under different names, all written by Robert Silverberg. His final tally runs to over 500 books, an average of eight for every year he was writing. Short story counts are harder to come by, but this chronological list of his bibliography goes on and on.

One of the nice things about prolific writers is that they also write a lot about themselves, so you can dig into their essays and try to figure out how they pulled off their tricks. Every Silverberg book comes with a longish introduction describing what his life was like when he wrote it, what his daily routine consisted of, how many works he had under contract at the time, who the editors were and what kinds of notes they offered, what kinds of cover artists had been retained, how many words he was producing by the hour, and pretty much anything else you'd like to know. He says he could write two stories a day and a full novel in three or four weeks. A major work might take him nine weeks.

These weren't flimsy pieces, either, though they didn't bloat to the gargantuan dimensions of, say, a Stephen King doorstop. These days, authors beef up their pub-counts by publishing dozens of divertimentos in small online magazines; often these types of "flash fiction" are only a paragraph or two in length. Silverberg was writing in the fifties, when the market for pulp was going strong. Kids were reading sci-fi stories for fun. They wanted action, they wanted plot, and they wanted adventure. They wanted stories, in short, that were actual stories, with surprising twists, rising and falling action, and plenty of other old-school thrills. I'm stunned, when I dive into this old material, at how long short stories used to be. You pick up a Robert E. Howard story and it goes on for fifty pages, with five-dollar words dropping every couple of lines.

That's the kind of thing Silverberg was pounding out: breezy, to be sure, but not exactly brief. Because of various eye ailments, I now read everything as an ebook or audiobook, so page counts aren't something I normally think about. But Silverberg stories usually take me twenty minutes or so to read. In his telling, he could bang out one before lunch, with a couple of novels cooking on the side.

Here's a picture of Silverberg at the time he was pulling off this feat:

He looks exactly like you'd expect. A wunderkind. A superhero's alter-ego. A boy with He looks about like you'd expect. A gawky wunderkind. A superhero's alter-ego. A boy with secret powers.

We can take the game one step further and posit that these powers were a curse as well as a blessing. What was it like, I wonder, to spend all those years, those solitary hours, hunched over a smoking Smith-Corona, peck-peck-pecking away? All those crumpled-up coffee cups and overfull ashtrays. All those words upon words—by Silverberg's own estimate, over a million words every year. Much of them hammered out, stroke by stroke, without the benefit of labor-saving word processors. The labor made Silverberg rich and famous, at least by authorial standards. But what was it like to live that life?

Maybe It’s Not So Great to Have the Writing Superpower

The answers are to be found, perhaps, in Silverberg's 1972 novel Dying Inside. Often heralded as the most "literary" of his books, Dying Inside is a story of a telepath having a midlife crisis. It's distinguished from Silverberg's other novels by having almost nothing in the way of plot. In Silverberg's day, writers often floated ideas by publishing short fiction in the magazine market. Then, if a shorter piece made a splash, a writer would mock it up into something long enough to be sold as a standalone paperback—much the way nonfiction authors will gussy up magazine articles today. Spend any time with classic SF, and you come across tons of these old, creaky books that are obviously patched-up, Frankensteinian affairs, where the writer has either taken a few related short stories and stitched them together into a shambolic whole, or taken one simple plot idea and padded it out with gobs of social commentary. According to Silverberg, that's not how Dying Inside was written. But it sure reads like it was written that way.

Here's how Silverberg described the book to his editor:

"It is a story set in reasonably here-and-now times, of a telepath of early middle age who has begun to lose his telepathic gift, and who is suffering as his powers wane. … The narrative mode will be nonlinear and fragmentary, but not really incoherent."

Not really incoherent, huh? What a pitch.

The book didn't sell. In Silverberg's preface to the new edition, he blames this failure on the cover art. He has a point. Here's the cover of the first edition:

And the paperback:

Here's the edition I read:

Yerk.

You can tell publishers were really struggling to figure out how to sell this book. A "fragmentary" story is, of course, inherently a tough proposition. On top of that, the book's a downer. Silverberg wrote it at a time when he was losing, or perhaps feared he was losing, his freakish but amazing ability to write ten books a year. His novel portrays a middle-aged man, not so different from Silverberg himself, who's losing, or fears he's losing, the ability to read minds.

When Silverberg sent the book off to his editor, she figured out immediately what was going on. "Dear Bob," she wrote, "I am … worried about you." Silverberg quotes her letter in his preface and uses much of the remaining space to argue that, even though his main character is exactly like him in almost every respect—a thirty-something Jewish male author who graduated from Columbia University, lives in New York City, and fears he might be losing his unusual gifts—the book is absolutely not at all autobiographical. You can decide if you're willing to take him at his word.

Maybe It’s Actually a Curse to Have the Writing Superpower?

So what's it like to be an insanely prolific fiction writer?

I picked up Silverberg's book, in part, because I wanted to find out.

I myself am not insanely prolific. I read and write incessantly but never seem to get anything done. I'm not a time-waster, exactly, but I'm not productive either. I'm an obsessive, but the wrong kind of obsessive. I don't have the superpower.

People who do have the writing superpower don't seem to understand what it's like not to have it. That makes it hard for them to convey what it is like to have it. They can't explain what makes them special. For them, special is normal.

What about an author who's losing his superpower, though? Who still has enough literary talent to convey what it's like to lose literary talent? Can he teach us the secrets to his uncanny art? Can he limn for us, elucidate for us, the contours of the kind of human mind that's able to produce ten novels a year?

As it turns out, the answer is—sort of.

Dying Inside is a book about a very familiar type of artistic anxiety. It's about a man who's not only losing his powers, but feels he wasted his powers while he had them. It's about a prodigy who's getting older, who feels he could have been a great man, a great artist, but now believes he abused his gift.

The central gimmick of the story is that, while Silverberg's hero is a mindreader, he's not an especially good mindreader. He's a hack. He can peer into people's heads, but he can't figure out any way to make use of what he's seeing there. Reading minds hasn't helped him make sense of other people. It hasn't given him special insights into human nature. It hasn't brought him fame and fortune. It merely serves him as a kind of shortcut past life's routine hassles. He cheats in school, cheats at work, cheats at sports, cheats at flirtation, but never faces any real challenges. As a result, he never accumulates any real achievements. His very facility, the ease with which he's able to manipulate people, has stymied his efforts to develop more sophisticated forms of empathy. Instead of sinking into the story of human life, he only sinks deeper into himself.

For someone steeped in the intellectual culture of the 60s, it turns out, reading minds isn't naturally conducive to human connection. Silverberg's hero looks into the heads of the liberated women around him, and he finds out they're all daydreaming about getting laid by other guys. He looks into the heads of the Black guys around him, and he finds out they're thinking about how much they hate white people. He looks into the heads of the Mexican immigrants around him, and he can barely understand what they're thinking at all. He looks into the heads of other white guys like himself, and he finds out they're all coming up with schemes to screw people over.

Reading minds doesn't help him relate to other humans, but it does give him a seedy way to make a living: he writes term papers for Ivy League jocks. This is 1969, so Silverberg's hero can't run an elaborate hi-tech operation using cutting-edge AI to hack plagiarism detection systems. He has to physically go to the Columbia campus and park himself on the steps and wheel-and-deal for his dough. Thanks to his telepathic powers, however, he has an AI-like ability to personalize his services; he uses his telepathic abilities to figure out what kinds of papers his clients would write if they were willing to bother, then does his best to imitate the style of their thoughts. He's a low-rent con-jobber for hire.

This ruse works well enough until our hero makes a crucial mistake. He takes a job from a star Black athlete who wants him to write a paper about Aeschylus. Unfortunately, the star Black athlete is also a passionate Afro-nationalist who makes a point of refusing to learn anything whatsoever about Ancient Greece. Silverberg's hero looks in this man's head and realizes there's no way in hell he could ever write a paper about Aeschylus, because the star Black athlete rejects the very validity of the exercise. The job's a nonstarter! There's no way to pull off a convincing fraud, because the client is constitutionally the sort of person who would never do the work on his own.

Nevertheless, overconfident in his powers, Silverberg's hero takes the gig. He figures, OK, he knows what he'll do, he'll write the paper the way a Black Power activist would do it: in jive! This plan, as you might imagine, runs awry, and our hero ends up getting in a scuffle with the star Black athlete, who rallies a pack of friends and wins hands-down. This draws the attention of university officials, who bring the hammer down on the hero's paper-forging racket. He loses his livelihood, and this setback coincides almost exactly with the guttering out of his telepathic powers, leaving him completely down and out. However, the fact that he's been so decisively humbled, and thereby humanized, sets the stage for a reconciliation with his estranged sister.

Maybe You Don’t Even Need the Writing Superpower

And … that's basically it. There are a million ways this plot could blow up in the reader's face—the whole thing is like a minefield laid under an ice-staking rink laced with tripwires—and it almost does; even as someone with a high tolerance for older, un-PC material, I found myself rolling my eyes at many passages. What saves the book is the background content, which is probably more interesting today than it would have been in 1972. Books themselves are a kind of mindreading technology, with their special power to transfer conscious thoughts across time and space, and Silverberg's depiction of telepathy at times becomes an almost painfully apt metaphor for the benefits and drawbacks of literacy itself. If the main idea here is that mindreading = solipsism—that looking into other people's heads paradoxically makes you feel more trapped in your own—Silverberg's novel is like a VR machine that traps you in the mindset of me-centric 60s culture.

Man! It's wild, what people were like back then! How egotistical they were. How psychological. You can practically see the ghost of Sigmund Freud walking around whispering in everyone's ear, urging them to obsesses about their deepest unconscious needs. Silverberg's hero reads the minds of other people, only to find they're all busily at work reading themselves. Every self a rich text, every soul a black hole, with psychedelics and introspection charting a one-way trip to the center of a narcissistic singularity. There are hints here and there, if you know how to spot them, of trends that will eventually swell into the anxious zeitgeist of our own day—all these chatterbox hedonists, all these goddamn players—but people in Silverberg's world still seem to be caught up in the psychoanalytic pretext that the way to become most fully yourself is to swan around shagging anything that breathes. There's so much unsexy sex in this book. So much laborious, therapeutic screwing. So many strained, laborious attempts to turn getting laid into a topline item on the task lists of elite self-improvers. So many hip young hotbodies dutifully battering through their inhibitions.

There's a secondary character in the book who's also a telepath, but, unlike the main character, he's not tortured or burdened by his superhuman power. He just frankly, unabashedly uses it to exploit people. To play the market and make a buck. To tell women what they want to hear to get them into bed. To make friends and influence people by being an unapologetic, unreconstructed sociopath. Don't you get it? He's self-actualized. A hack without hangups. An unrepentant self-pleaser. He doesn't have to worry about misreading people because he's not even trying to understand them. Humanity isn't an open book to him; it's a dashboard with every button clearly labeled. Inputs and outputs. Everything streamlined. Flip switch X to get result Y. The ultimate optimized modern man.

Our hero, by contrast, flounders and flails because he wants to be an artist of empathic connection: a Proust among mindreaders, the Tolstoy of telepaths. Not someone who rummages inside others' heads, scrounging for material he can use to score a status boost. The tragedy of his life, it turns out, is that his telepathy's a one-way conduit. He can only receive others' thoughts, not send his own. He's like an early lurker on the internet, dealing with information glut before we had a name for it, blasted by a torrential stream of feelings, thoughts, and needs, while knowing his own frail signals can't compete. Who's even listening to him? Who would want to? All he ever thinks about is other people's thoughts.

There's an early scene in the novel where the hero's still young, lying out in a field in the country, letting his mind drift and roam through other souls in the vicinity. He reads the thoughts of a hen as it lays an egg. He reads the thoughts of a boy and girl coupling in the woods. He reads the thoughts of butterflies, bugs, and blades of grass.

At one point, he enters the mind of a farmer who's working in a field nearby—a famously aloof and taciturn man who, it seems to all observers, has withdrawn into hermit-like hatred of the world. Silverberg's hero sneaks a peek at this guy's mind and is surprised to discover that the man's a modern mystic, secretly savoring the sensations of existence, overwhelmed with the joy of merely being alive. The hero recoils in distaste. It's too deep! Too intense! It makes him feel unworthy. Like he's failing at life.

At the end of the novel, the hero's power, before it dies, flares up in one last overmastering burst, and he's treated to a similar vision of his own: all humans, all minds, all living things, connected, wholly legible, joined in an ecstatic whole. He chides himself—this is the noos, the source, what life is really and ultimately about; this is what he should have been using his talents for all along.

But the joke's on him. He had the answer he needed at the start. He didn't have to be successful, accomplished, artful, or productive. He didn't have to win the status game, or to use his rare powers for any concrete purpose whatsoever. Really, he never even needed to be a mindreader at all. He could have had the whole world, that deep human connection, simply by learning how to tune out.