Did you know that the writer who holds the record for writing the most novels is Spanish author Corín Tellado (also known as Maria Lopez, or María del Socorro Tellado López)?
I didn’t. And apparently, thanks to the ever-changing algorithm, it’s not that easy to find out. You can get several completely different results. But, after surfing Google for a whole ten minutes (and stumbling at pure gold by the name Christopher Fowler, who also found this topic rather interesting), I think I can confirm that she, Corín Tellado also known as Maria Lopez, is the author with the most novels under her belt.
This lady wrote a mind-blowing number of over 4,000 novels and novellas during her career, which spanned from 1946 till her death in 2009. If that’s not an impressive achievement, I don’t know what is.
And that’s just the beginning. Even though I never heard of her (but you should forgive me, I never learned to read), turns out her works were popular, and she is often referred to as one of the most prolific writers in history.
Now I know what you think. How did she do it? 4,000 novels and novellas aren’t something to sneeze at. Apparently, it is possible if you optimize the process to a point where every step of writing is polished to perfection.
From what I found, many of her works were shorter than typical novels, often ranging between 25,000 to 50,000 words. This allowed her to complete each work more quickly compared to longer novels. But don’t get fooled by the size.
Writing a novella in two days, and that’s precisely what she did, is a hard work, if not an impossible challenge to most even with modern technology at their disposal. Yet Tellado was a very fast typist. How fast? 25,000 words in two days fast. You do the math (I did, it’s 12,500 words per day, don’t thank me). Actually, pretty impressive, and sounds almost impossible to keep this pace for longer periods of time even though, the legends say she did, and the result is 4,000 novels and novellas.
Tellado also specialized in romance novels, her bread and butter, which according to the internet, often follow a formulaic structure. This familiarity with the genre and its conventions allowed her to write quickly and efficiently, without needing extensive research or plotting for each book. Joke or not, but basically this lady did Hallmark’s work at least 54 years before it released its first Christmas movie (for those who want to know more, but too lazy to Google, the movies is The Christmas Secret, and it was released December 17, 2000, and is considered the first ever Hallmark Christmas movie).
The last, but far from least, were her strong work ethic and dedication to writing. Tellado treated writing as a full-time job, often working long hours to produce her stories (that’s what the internet said, I wasn’t there to check).
The only problem is, she wrote only in Spanish, apparently was never translated into English, and since I successfully forgot Spanish (and not just Spanish) right after I was done with BA in philology, I can only assume that she knew what she was doing. I have no means to check out her novels, and to form any opinion on those. Were they any good? What was the quality of a novel written in two days? I don’t know what to say here, as I said, I didn’t read to form an opinion.
And that’s, kids, how you write 4,000 novels and novellas during your lifetime. You optimize, polish, and cut corners to a point where you don’t really have to think anymore. Really well-put, automated process. That’s exactly why an AI was invented, by the way. You got to pump those numbers.