Asimov how many books

Getting stuck is normal. Instead, I simply leave the novel and go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap. I write an editorial, or an essay, or a short story, or work on one of my nonfiction books.

I return to my novel and find myself able to write easily once more. When writing this article, I got so frustrated that I dropped it and worked on other projects for two weeks. The brain works in mysterious ways. By stepping aside, finding other projects, and actively ignoring something, our subconscious creates space for ideas to grow.

All creatives—be they entrepreneurs, writers, or artists—know the fear of giving shape to ideas. Sometimes, after publishing an article, I am so afraid that I will actively avoid all comments and email correspondence….

The ordinary writer is bound to be assailed by insecurities as he writes. Is the sentence he has just created a sensible one? Is it expressed as well as it might be?

Would it sound better if it were written differently? The ordinary writer is therefore always revising, always chopping and changing, always trying on different ways of expressing himself, and, for all I know, never being entirely satisfied. I am a relentless editor. It still looks like shit. We draw into it when times are hard. It gives us safety… The safety of a lie. The truth is, all of us have ideas. Little seeds of creativity waft in through the windowsills of the mind. The difference between Asimov and the rest of us is that we reject our ideas before giving them a chance.

Asimov was fully against the pursuit of perfectionism. He never wrote a book about writing. Fortunately, though, for those of us obsessed with understanding the secret to his insane productivity, he did include several chapters on his writing process in his autobiography, It's Been a Good Life. In it, he reveals the exact strategies he used to produce thousands of publishable pages during his lifetime.

If he were to have assembled these chapters into a book on writing, the theme that would have emerged? Here are some excerpts:. It was a relief to discover that even Asimov would sometimes get bored with his writing projects. But that never stopped him from producing new pages.

He would just shift his attention to one of the many other writing projects he was working on at the moment:.

Frequently, when I am at work on a science-fiction novel the hardest to do of all the different things I write , I find myself heartily sick of it and unable to write another word. But I don't let that drive me crazy. I don't stare at blank sheets of paper Instead, I simply leave the novel and go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap.

I write an editorial, or an essay, or a short story, or work on one of my nonfiction books. Asimov argues you won't be a prolific writer if you need to rely on having several hours of uninterrupted time to write.

If there are 15 minutes in which I have nothing to do, that's enough to write a page or so. It can often be hard to get into the state of flow, or deep concentration, you need to start writing. Asimov seemed to have no trouble doing that.

I understand that there always be some grey area as to what everything counts as, but I'd happy to accept any consistent counting method used which meets the above criteria and produces a number of novels and an overall number of stories.

Every other published work of his SF output appears to be a collection of his short stories or an omnibus that can mix novels and short stories. Because of the great amount of re-use of individual stories across these it is hard to give a good answer how many disjunct collections there might be. I actually went through the ISFDb search for short fiction and, removing the 36 short stories in the 5 above "novels," duplicates, variations, non-genre stories, extracts, etc.

This list doesn't include the " Black Widowers " stories 67 in all that have their own set of 6 collections, however it does include the 8 Azazel stories published after the collection Azazel was released and not included in it.

As to the number of unique collections, much of Asimov's early work appears only in a single collection up until the time later in his career when omnibus collections started to be created.

Note that there are only 10 stories missing to , about half of which were never reprinted. Things get spottier after that, as new stories show up in collections like Omnibus Even More of the Complete Rest of the Robots along with the 67th republishing of the early stories from I, Robot. Since I've got this tabulated already, these are the short stories that appear in the novel-like collections:.

For the stories that comprise the Foundation trilogy I'm using the names as published in those books, instead of the names Campbell used for their original publication in Astounding , because they are far better known under the latter names. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How many books did Isaac Asimov write? Ask Question. Asked 4 months ago. Active 3 months ago. Viewed times. To quote from an online Asimov FAQ site : the most complete Asimov bibliography which Asimov himself had a hand in preparing is the catalogue in I. If we only count a full novel as a book, then how many books would Asimov have written? How many novels did Isaac Asimov write? How many individual stories did Isaac Asimov write?