Hey stranger,
In this episode, I show how to use expert problem-solving skills to go from writing a medium-sized book for a year to creating a whole body of work like Jules Verne did.
If you prefer watching, you can find the YouTube video here.
If reading is your thing, then enjoy the transcript below.
Hi, and welcome to The Daily Recall show. I am Vasili, your host.
Today, I will talk real problem solving skills. I will take the conceptual knowledge that I've explained in the past couple episodes and apply it to a very interesting problem of how would you go about writing five books in five days.
I picked up writing as an example of a problem because that's what many people are aware of; I think that everybody sometimes in their life wanted to write a book.
But the problem with writing a book is that it takes a lot of time. You can make it really small, a couple pages long, and write it quickly. But if you want to write a really good one, like Leo Tolstoy did, then it takes decades. That's the problem we're going to be solving today; how do you write a book of Leo Tolstoy but faster.
And the way the most people most writers solve this problem is by going for a compromise. They settle somewhere in the middle. They say: "Okay, I'm not Leo Tolstoy, so I cannot write for decades to produce something like 3 million characters, but my publisher is kind of okay with a couple hundred pages long book. So that's what I'm going to aim for." That's how most people solve this problem.
But the real problem solving skills suggest that the best way to approach this problem is to first start not from looking for a compromise by saying that okay, I've got a couple months and that means I'm going to write 100 pages book or 200 pages long book, but instead to intensify the contradictions.
Here's what I mean by intensifying contradictions. Let's take these two variables, the size of the book and the time that is needed to produce a book of that size. And let’s start tearing them apart a little bit.
If it takes a couple of months to write a hundred pages book, then we can start by reducing the time dimension over there. And we can say: "What would it take to write a couple hundred pages book in a month?" And then we can go ahead and make time even smaller; say, a week, or even a couple days, okay.
And then we have this another variable which is the volume of the book. And the volume might be from something like a tiny short book to something really big like the Leo Tolstoy book. So let's go and increase the volume instead of looking for a compromise.
Then the question that we will end up solving would be: "Okay, how do you write a big book in no time?" That's when the contradictions are really, really intense.
For a person who doesn’t know how to solve problems this doesn’t make any sense. But the reason why we're doing this is because intensifying contradictions always leads to asking the right questions. And intensifying contradictions always leads to thinking the right thoughts.
Let's wrap up this first part; we intensified contradictions and went from asking "how do I write a medium book in a medium time?" that most authors are trying to figure out to a more interesting one, "how do I write a big book in no time?"
And I think that most authors are not desperate for writing one book. They want to create a body of work, their legacy, their end game, something like that. So we ended up transforming this original question into something much more interesting, which is: "how do I create a body of work, like the Jules Verne body of work of 70 books in no time?"
That’s when contradictions are really intense. And that's a much more interesting problem to solve.
The reason why I'm doing this is because if we figure out how to solve this big problem, then the problem of writing a single book is not going to be a problem anymore. So it's very useful always to think through these bigger questions before jumping to a solution. Because if you just keep writing one book at a time, you're not going to be neither Jules neither Leo as a result, but just another random writer.
But these guys knew something different. And this is what I'm going to be talking about in just in a couple of seconds.
The first thing that we did, we intensified contradictions. And instead of asking, "how do I settle for writing a book of medium size and medium time?", we went to something like "how to create a body of work of many, many, many books in no time?".
And the next thinking model that we can apply to solve this problem is the screens model.
Let's picture a book as a vertical hierarchy of ideas; where a book of many ideas is something in the middle, a sentence of one idea is in the very bottom, and whole Jules Verne body of work of 70 novels is at the very top.
When a trained person pictures this hierarchy, he sees this book not just as object but as a part of a bigger system above it. And also as a bigger system to low level systems below it.
On the low level, it could be a chapter or a page. That's what a book is comprised of. And on an even more low level, it could be a paragraph or a sentence, and so on. And above the book, it could be a series, where there are a couple books about one topic. And then even beyond that there is this Jules Verne guy who wrote 70 books that were kept publishing long after he was dead.
So that would be the vertical hierarchy of ideas by volume; bigger volume = more ideas.
And for each layer in this vertical hierarchy we have a time dimension; to our left is the past and to our right is the future.
And then we can start thinking for the individual book layer; what was this book in the past? Before this book was originally published some time ago, it was just a manuscript of the book, right? And before that, it was basically a collection of chapters and before that, it was a collection of ideas. And even before that, it was probably a tiny idea that the whole book emerged from.
But the coolest thing about this model is not in the vertical layers themselves. The coolest thing is that on each layer's time dimension, there are different things that were happening in the past and will be happening the future.
This is where I really want you to pay attention because this is the most important part in this whole episode. For each layer of complexity of the idea, there are different things that are happening in the past and in the future.
And let's just come back to the original question for a second.
So the original question was, how do you write a book? And how do you write a book in a very short amount of time, okay? Because that's what everybody wants
But the really interesting thing is that if you jump back in time here between these screens on the book level, you can see that this book was a collection of ideas in the past. And before that was just one idea and so on.
But if you do the same time travel but on the higher level where it's not just one book, but a collection of books, you'll be very surprised. Because things that were happening in the past, that preceded this body of work, were totally different than on a single book level. And this is the most interesting part.
Because Jules Verne, the guy who wrote 70 novels about travelers and inventors, approached writing in a totally different manner. The way he approached writing is by developing a category of ideas instead of writing one book. He took extensive notes anywhere he went. When he died, he left a collection of 20,000 notebooks. 20,000 notebooks with ideas.
If we just come back to our model here, the work of Jules, his 70 novels, is on the very top in this vertical hierarchy of ideas. But what if we jump back in time? What was before that body of work emerged and how did it come to emerge? That's a very interesting question.
Because this body of work was being developed asynchronously; he wasn't writing one book at a time. It was the category of knowledge that he came up with that enabled him to keep writing his volumes.
And the reason this is so cool is because when you invent a category like Jules did, you don't have to write one book at a time. You basically invent the whole world. That's what Tolkien did as well. And you invent the characters, you invent the stories, you invent the machines that they're using, etc.
And if you if you've read Jules Verne, which I highly recommend doing, you'll notice a pattern in his works. They are comprised of similar events and even have characters intertwined between novels.
So let's call this knowledge source that he’s developed the tesseract of knowledge; the source of infinite power from which are every single knowledge unit that you produce stems from. And when you've developed this tesseract of knowledge, writing is not actually a problem anymore, right? Writing a book becomes just a byproduct of your work; another representation of your tesseract of knowledge. Writing a book is not anymore the problem that you're solving in the first place.
Let’s come back now to these two notions that we discussed. The first notion was that instead of thinking that you're going to write a book, you better start thinking about how to write 100 books in no time because that's how you solve a bigger problem of creating your body of work; your legacy.
And that leads you to understanding that you can’t possibly write that much if you're not deriving these ideas from the same knowledge source; the tesseract of knowledge.
And that's how you come to understand that you need to create this tesseract of knowledge instead of going for one book at a time. Because if you jump back in time and track what Jules did; he was not just thinking about chapters of the book and thinking about different kind of sections and different stories or different characters from the book - like everybody else does in the world. He was thinking about the world that he's creating; he was developing his tesseract of knowledge - and the books just stemmed from there. And that's why he was able to produce so much.
Because there is no way you can produce such an enormous amount of words and characters and stories if you pull them from different sources. So the right way to do that is to do what Jules did; to start developing the category of knowledge.
And then all you need to do is to create multiple representations of your tesseract; to derive new combinations of ideas from the same source. And his novels, despite being very different by their nature, share many things in common. And that’s the coolest part because people who enjoyed just one book of his also enjoyed his whole body of work.
And that's why it was so easy for him to produce more novels; he never started from scratch but derived new ideas from combinations of knowledge in his tesseract. He took extensive notes. He then these notes to develop his own category of knowledge. He was not writing like a chapter at a time; he was developing all these and future works at the same time because all of them stemmed from one source.
So the way to write five books in five days, and the way to write a book, is actually by not going and writing a book, but by thinking instead of a category of knowledge that you can create. And then creating that category through learning, taking notes, and developing ideas.
And once you do that, then writing a book is not a problem anymore. Because you will write not just one, you will write 20, or 30, or 50, or even a hundred books at once if you have your tesseract.
Let's now run through an example of how to build one. Because this is what the next question is: "Okay, this makes sense, but how do I do that? How to identify a category? How do I start developing this?"
I think that actually starts from within; from your own interests. Because it's hard to push yourself to study enough to develop a category of knowledge in an area you don’t care about.
Let's say you like fitness. For example, you picked up an idea about are some fitness thing that you wanted to write about; some fitness advice. How do you start developing a category of knowledge from there?
And to do that, imagine that this fitness advice is just half a page in a book. Because that's what it is probably in terms of density, right?
And then you can think: "Okay, this fitness advice is half page long. It's in this book. And what is the chapter about that this fitness advice is located into?" So you try to understand the principle behind this specific advice and level up a little bit. And then you can see that this fitness advice probably belongs to a more general chapter on how to stay fit, right?
And then you can level up a little bit from there and ask: "Okay, and what are other things in that chapter? What are the other half page advice on how to stay fit?"
And then you can compress this even more; level up even more and ask: "Okay, but what the book is about?"
That's where really interesting stuff happens.
Because if you start thinking that this piece of advice is just half a page in a book, and the chapter to which it belongs, or is probably about fitness or a specific part of fitness, then the book is probably about how to live a life where those things like fitness and nutrition are basically taken care of on autopilot.
And then you can think: "What series does this book belong to?"
I think you've got the idea.
And that's how you arrive to this category thing by creating this model of a book and asking just one simple question over and over again.
And the coolest thing is that when you start from any step in this vertical hierarchy, you can always level up; you can always ask the question, what's the next level behind this one?
And once you do that, you will arrive to understanding what is the category of knowledge that you're going to produce. And you will also get to develop this category much faster because you'll see that the upper levels - chapters - are combined of many things like this half page fitness advice, and that pushes you to start being curious about what are those things.
Thank you very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Take care!
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
How to Write Like Jules Verne - 5 Books In 5 Days