How I Wrote a Book in 3 Days
blog.teamtreehouse.com
blog.teamtreehouse.com
“Poorly.”
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Every application I've seen that was written in three days with any amount of functionality was also written poorly. But it didn't matter. Because you don't consume the application's code, you consume the application. The trouble with writing a book is that you do consume the product of the book directly. That's why I'm skeptical.
That said, maybe this book is awesome. That would be awesome, and hopefully would get more people riding the writing train and flexing that language muscle so many often forget about.
― Christopher Hitchens
Basically, it just expresses the fact that that only 5% of people are on the 95th percentile.
That being said, I give him a lot of credit. I give him credit because the hardest part of writing a book is writing a freakin' book. Anyone who's ever seriously attempted the exercise knows that much. You have to overcome ten million types of personal inertia to get started, and ten million types of friction and resistance in order to keep at it. There may be no shortage of bad books out there, but there's a substantially larger number of unfinished books. The latter problem dwarfs the former.
While I haven't read his book, and I can't say for certain what his thesis may be, it seems to follow the "move fast and break things" philosophy. If that's the case, then it seems fitting he put his money where his mouth is, and wrote the book in the spirit it is intended to convey.
We'll see if it's actually worth reading. But even if it's not, hey, at least he did something. He may have succeeded, or he may have failed, but he got started. I hope he's got more books where this came from, and that each one gets better as he progresses.
I suspect that I spent more than three days on researching lunar geology, minerology, titanium refining, the compresibility of air, etc.
Not to mention that my first draft took 9 months, and my revisions have taken 12 months.
Some things require iteration and polishing. Writing, IMO, is one of those things.
I would far far rather read a book written by you in three days on orbital mechanics and what is feasible and what might change. Then another on lunar geology and moonbases.
I am having a hard time getting back to fiction these days and my brain craves idea candy. And you seem to be stirring that sugar into a healthy and nutritious meal.
Bu sometimes consumers just want to lick the bowl
>"complex stuff distilled into a simple essence" books by people who've spent a long time researching and understanding the topics at hand
This is an orthogonal point, though. He said he's writing a novel, and you're saying don't want to read novels, because you like quickly digestible information.
He's not trying to write an informational book about orbital mechanics. He's saying he spent time researching that subject in service of his work of fiction. Presumably, he did that research to help flesh out the world of his story, and to make sure his science fiction is informed by real science (something few SF writers these days actually take the time and effort to do). I don't think his goal is to "stir sugar into a healthy and nutritious meal," but rather, to stir nutrition into what would typically be a sugary snack.
J.R.R. Tolkien famously spent a great deal of time creating an entire language before incorporating it into his Lord of the Rings series. That doesn't mean he should have written a dictionary of the language instead, and then kept the novel a separate work. His primary goal was the novel, with the linguistics being a (very fleshed out) supporting detail.
I just want, tasters ...
Signed up for the email list by the way - space battles with rusty oil tankers, sounds fun :-)
http://boingboing.net/2011/08/05/write-an-adventure-novel-in...
That being said, it's different for every project. Some subject matters / genres follow a certain cadence/form that can be fast tracked through.
Any research or period elements though tend to slow it down.
I do have some experience with writing/publishing :)
PS: my current book took me 4 years to finish :D
That said, following your progress reports has been entertaining. Looking forward to the finished product.
Lots of people communicate information in a hurried manner using a similar formula.
- College students do it the last week of every semester but its called a paper
- Bloggers do it all the time but its called a blog
A book typically infers to most people something that has been written in a very thoughtful or high quality manner with much thought put into it (and we have many descriptors for the "lesser" forms... articles, stories, etc.) That doesnt mean you can't write a proper book in 3 days... but whats the point? - you are just likely putting yourself at a disadvantage. What matters is how impactful the book is. If you spend 3 days and its forgotten (sorry but likely based upon effort) and somebody else spends 1 year to craft something meaningful (much more likely based upon the history of literature) its pretty obvious who is creating value for their readers.
These articles read to me like "hey look at me I wrote a book in 3 days"... there is no mention of what is truly unique or skillful about it. Sorry to be so negative but I just feel like this encourages the creation of pretty artificial stuff that will be forgotten in a week.
So are shitty products. So are mediocre products. So what? That pull-quote tells me nothing useful. Products are the result of decisions.
Is this kind of trite observation indicative of the book's content?
But I'm skeptical. I've seen a few too many "Rorschach aphorisms" where some readers, really wanting to believe that the text has some important meaning for them, end up inventing it for what is essentially trite or content-free.
For example, a three day scrawl by John Carmack about his latest thoughts and experiences with graphics technology would be ace. (I read an e-book collection of all his old .plan updates and while it was disjointed, it satisfied my lust for a geeky read.)
Here's the idea: they sit down/have a long call with an interesting character, talk with them extensively, get them to type out some further stories, then the publisher does all the work of making it readable without killing the subject's voice.
PeepCode and Tekpub do something like this in the screencasting world where they sit with respected developers and bash through a project and talk about tools for an hour or two. I've not seen it done in the written word other than, perhaps, feature articles for magazines.
As noted by others, this also discounts the time taken earlier, discussing the process to be documented, with your friend -- so I guesstimate "How I wrote a book in a short month" might be more accurate.
I really wonder if you didn't just demonstrate how to write a (good) blog post in a month -- I'll be very surprised if your book is better (sheds meaningfully more light on your process) than the blog post.
Either way, I respect you for doing it - and getting it done. It reminds me of someone (couldn't find the link now?) writing that their first book took one year to write, spending less than a month on the structure, and the rest on writing (and re-writing) -- and the second book took three months, two of which was spent on the structure/table of contents. Moral being that time spent on design/plan is returned many times when "fleshing out" the text.
Perhaps it was noted somewhere in "On Writing Well"[1] -- a book I highly recommend for anyone interested in doing any kind of writing.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060891548/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
He did not "write a book in 3 days" in anything but the purely mechanical sense that he put the words of the final version down in 3 days.
Usually these articles on "How to do X in Y days" boil down to:
- Prepare upfront (in this case 5 days on the draft that he threw away + time spent learning the subject by doing + time spent talking about the idea with someone).
- Divide and conquer.
- Don't do more than necessary (in this case, make the book only as long as need to convey your message; adding more words to make the word count longer does not improve quality)
- You'll be a lot faster at pretty much anything you already know well enough to talk about at length.
If you have a decent amount of practice formulating yourself, putting the words down is not the hard part of writing a book.
Learning to understand the subject, and then structuring the material is.
In this case, by the time he'd learned about the subject and invested the time in figuring out how to communicate it, actually writing the final version was not a huge investment in time, and that is the real takeaway.
Still a big accomplishment and something most people will never do, so good on him for doing it.
There are countless examples of artists producing work at breakneck speeds; Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Frank Zappa, Issac Asimov, Alexandre Dumas, etc... I could go on and on.
Assuming the book actually was written in three days (planning, research, the actual writing, typography, editing, etc), I'm not sure I want to read it, because I fear the quality to be low. Similarly, I'm not sure I want to read an article by the same author.
Pity.
I think that releasing software quickly is completely different to releasing a physical item quickly. You continue working on the software and update as necessary but you cannot update a physical book that is sitting on someone's coffee table.
How much time was spent on the content of the book versus the design? Is the content alone worth the price asked or is the content just a filler for the book design/marketing effort?
I would be lying if I say that I'm not curious about the quality of the content, which is exactly why I decided to jump the gun. Worst case scenario, I'm out $29. Best case scenario, I improve my execution abilities.
Will keep you posted.
So if there's an big push to "execute" as quickly as possible, why did they go with a physical book when they could have shipped a finished book in digital format exponentially faster?
I would love to read the book, but I don't buy physical books anymore.
Just a thought.