I saw a guy sitting beside me on the plane this week reading a John Grisham novel.
I've never read John Grisham.
I asked him about it, and we were chatting about the books and how so many people seem to love them, and you see them everywhere.
He told me how prolific an author John Grisham is, and he turned to the inside front couple of pages to show me the list of books he's written.
There must be 50.
And then he said, "What a talented guy this guy must be," and I was surprised.
Over years of reading about how people write, it's clear that what writers do is they write.
Murakami, the Japanese writer, wrote beautifully about this in his book "What I Talk about When I Talk about Running", where he describes his life and how he writes every single day for four hours before he goes for a run.
That is a pattern over and over again.
Prolific writers write all the time, almost every day and see what they get.
That's what prolific people do.
Prolific free kick takers in football take prolific amounts of free kicks, and prolific investors look at the markets and invest all the time.
The thing about being prolific is it probably has much less to do with talent and much more to do with turning up and being prolific.
Blog Post Number - 3582