

How I Wrote a Book in 3 Days - commondream
http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/how-i-wrote-a-book-in-3-days

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shadowfiend
I will not pass final judgement on the book until I've had an opportunity to
read it, of course. But my initial reaction to this title is one word:

“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.

~~~
StavrosK
"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should
stay."

― Christopher Hitchens

~~~
pestaa
Looking forward to write both a technical and a non-technical book in the
future, that quote is _really_ hard to digest.

~~~
StavrosK
If you work hard enough on becoming a good writer, you shouldn't fear
anything.

Basically, it just expresses the fact that that only 5% of people are on the
95th percentile.

~~~
gizmo686
Isn't it saying something more like: only the top 5% of people are worth
reading.

~~~
StavrosK
Ah, yes, that was the other implication, which I took for granted. Generally,
though, only people in the top X% of anything are worth attention, I think.

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tjic
Having been working on a science fiction novel that covers economics, futures
markets, genetic uplift, AI, finance, combat, and orbital mechanics, and
having been working on it for 3-5 hours per day for 18 months (
<http://morlockpublishing.com/the-book/> ), I'm somewhat underwhelmed with
anything that can be done in three days.

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.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I have not read your book or the OPs, but would you mind combining the two

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

~~~
jonnathanson
_"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."_

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.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I am not saying what he _should_ do, I completely accept that he may well just
care about his novel.

I just want, tasters ...

Signed up for the email list by the way - space battles with rusty oil
tankers, sounds fun :-)

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moocow01
I honestly dont understand what the take away is from these articles...

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.

~~~
ScottWhigham
I think the take away is, "Look at my linkbait headline and click!" That's the
only possible thing I can think of. I'm with you - it's a hurridly-written
"book" and the headline screams "hey look at me I wrote a book in 3 days"
(like you said). Linkbait.

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jamesbritt
"Great products are simply the result of decisions made aong the way."

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?

~~~
seanlinehan
In context it may be more impactful. In the book "Made to Stick", the authors
make the point that most people think that the their final "one-liner" is the
most impactful portion of their writing or their speech, but it turns out that
the story leading up to that sound-bite is usually much more important and
memorable. This may one of those situation. (Which, in all fairness, would
probably have been noticed and not used as a pull-quote had the book been
written in _more_ than 3 days)

~~~
jamesbritt
OK, I get that, like the punch line of a joke, the part that gets the reaction
may only make sense given all that lead up to it.

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.

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enobrev
Unless the author is Hunter S. Thompson or someone of that ilk, I'm not sure
I'd really want to read a book written in 3 days.

~~~
petercooper
I think there are a _lot_ of authors whose 3 day long first draft I'd buy and
read especially in non-fiction.

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.)

~~~
commondream
Totally agree. I don't know that time or even refinement is what makes a great
story. Yeah, the certainly don't hurt, but if you tell me the most amazing
story ever and it's a little sloppy, I'm still probably going to think it's
the most amazing story ever.

~~~
petercooper
I wonder if there's opportunity for a publisher to specialize in this (or
create a series). I will ask them!

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.

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parallel
You do it by stretching the informal but accepted definition of "book". Which
reminds me of the more irksome side of marketing.

------
e12e
Clearly, this shows how you wrote a book in eight days (five days for the
first draft, three days for the second). Still impressive, but it isn't the
same as writing a book in three days.

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?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060891548/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060891548&linkCode=as2&tag=hypertekstnet-20)

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vidarh
What I see _every_ time I see an article like this is that it understates the
real time investment, whether intentionally or because people get over-excited
about learning how quickly they could do it.

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.

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ISeemToBeAVerb
Regarding the negative comments, time alone is not an indicator of quality.
The consumer doesn't care how long it took you to do something. In many
instances, we don't even know the time it took. Some people take decades to
produce work, while others take hours or days. The proof of value is always in
the work itself.

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.

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waxjar
I didn't read this article because of its title. I think it is either a lie or
a lie that's nuanced in a way to be technically true.

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.

------
wanderingstan
Renowned author Oliver Sacks tells that he wrote his first book in 10 days. He
had committed to kill himself if he didn't make this goal. The story is in
this RadioLab episode: <http://www.radiolab.org/2011/mar/08/>

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tetomb
It would be interesting to read a preview of the book.

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?

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joshbert
I believe in the vision that these guys have. I contacted Drew and before
ordering and he was very pleasant to deal with, so I went for it.

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.

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Shpigford
With the word "execute" I also associate the word "ship".

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.

~~~
alanfalcon
The print publishing process gives you chances to find and correct errors
(typos, etc.) before people get their copy of the book. Of course, if you
don't mind publishing with errors initially you can update an eBook in ways
you can't really update a printed paper copy of the book.

Just a thought.

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Jabbles
So where can I get a sample of this masterpiece that took 8 days to write?

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elchief
Christ, it took me 4 months to submit a passable draft of ONE chapter. Good on
ya.

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swanson
Is there an ebook version coming? I don't really need/want a hardcover copy.

~~~
joshlong
There will be ebook versions later.

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EricR23
Anybody notice the table of contents and page numbers?

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error
must be awesome! if books start to be written like blog posts then.. oh well I
have nothing to say, I will write a book about it.

