Author Sidney Sheldon, novelist and television producer, died Tuesday at 89.

Though pop culture will likely remember him for putting The Patty Duke Show and I Dream of Jeannie on the air, he also published eighteen novels. He decided to try his hand at novel writing as ‘Jeannie’ was coming to a close.

According to his obituary, he’d shut himself in his office from 9:00am until noon, and dictate pages. Over the years, he developed his writing pace of dictating about fifty pages per day to either a secretary or into a tape recorder. He’d keep working on a novel until he reached 1,200-1,500 pages:

“Then I do a complete rewrite…12 to 15 times. I spend a whole year rewriting.”

Sheldon prided himself on the authenticity he felt he put into each novel. In a 1987 interview, he said, “If I write about a place, I have been there. If I write about a meal in Indonesia, I have eaten there in that restaurant. I don’t think you can fool the reader.”

Known for writing about women who were talented, capable and feminine, he reached a large female readership. In 1982, when asked about the secrets to his plotting, he said this:

“I try to write my books so the reader can’t put them down. I try to construct them so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she has to read just one more chapter. It’s the technique of the old Saturday afternoon serial: leave the guy hanging on the edge of the cliff at the end of the chapter.”

I’ve never read one of his books, but I’ll admit to trying to leave each chapter of my own manuscript with some kind of mini-cliffhanger. Sometimes, it’s unconscious; the place that just “feels” right for a chapter break ends up being just before something big is obviously going to happen. Sometimes, as I’m writing a scene, I plan on ending on a cliffhanger.

I don’t think that I could come up with fifty pages a day, even if I didn’t have any other job to face every day. (I’m still waiting on the big lotto win!) And I don’t think I’d do that well with dictation, either. For me, I like seeing the words either on paper or on the screen as I’m writing them, so I can go back immediately a paragraph or two and make sure I wasn’t leaving something out. I revise as I’m writing, then revise again when I put those chapters into the “master document” of the manuscript itself.

But twelve to fifteen rewrites? I don’t know that I could take that many. There comes a point, at least for me, when I think it’s as good as it’s going to get, and any further tinkering becomes “tinkering for tinkering’s sake.”

Then again, this is why it interests me to see how other writers — particularly of the successfully published variety — do things. It’s a nice reminder that what works for one writer doesn’t automatically work for me, and it gives me a reason to think about why — for me — my way seems better.