How Simenon wrote over 200 novels

In the Summer issue of Bookforum, Luc Sante discusses several novels of Georges Simenon that have been re-released. Of the "phenomenally prolific" Simenon, who wrote over 200 novels, he writes:

Famously, two days before starting a novel, he would consult a map of the place where the book was to be set, search through his collections of telephone books for names of characters, and establish the cast -- ages, backgrounds, family ties -- on the back of a manila envelope. Then he was ready, as he told a Paris Review interviewer in 1955:

On the eve of the first day I know what will happen in the first chapter. Then, day after day, chapter after chapter, I find what comes later. After I have started a novel I write a chapter each day, without ever missing a day. Because it is a strain, I have to keep pace with the novel... All the day I am one of my characters. I feel what he feels.... And it's almost unbearable after five or six days. That is one of the reasons my novels are so short; after eleven days I can't -- it's impossible. I have to -- it's physical. I am too tired.

In this 1997 obituary, Simenon is further quoted:

I write a chapter a day. It's the character who commands, not me. I know the end only when I finish. But during the time I'm writing I concentrate, concentrate on my characters. Only the characters matter.