Bryan Alvarez talks upcoming “100 Things” book for WWE fans

PC: How did you find the time to work on this while also handling your various Figure Four Online duties?

BA: Well, it was really hard because I schedule my day like to the minute in a lot of ways. So, you know on a given day—like today I’ve got this interview. I’ve got another interview. I’ve got Observer Live, and then I immediately go to an appointment that I have. I immediately come back and do the Lance show, and I’m immediately gonna go and teach a kids jiu-jitsu class.

I’m gonna come home, see my child who’s coming home and my wife, then I’m gonna go teach an adult jiu-jitsu class. Then I’m gonna go to dinner. Then I’m gonna come back. So, I don’t even have lunch scheduled in there. It’s possible, I don’t know what I’m gonna do for lunch today, but that’s like a normal day.

So if I were writing the book, what am I gonna do? Well, I’m gonna come home at 11 o’ clock tonight, then I’m gonna start writing the book and I’m gonna write the book for two hours, then I’m gonna go to bed. So that’s what I did.

If I had any free time during the day, that free time got filled with the book. And so there were days where, you know I’m 98% done with the book, and I’m just kind of thinking like, god, in a week I’m gonna come home and I’m not gonna have anything to do.

Like, man, what could I do during that period? So, it was not hard because I could find time to do it, but it was complicated enough that I was really looking forward to being able to come home on a Friday night at 11, and like I’m done! And that was, I didn’t have that for many months.

PC: What was the hardest part of the process in writing and finishing this book?

BA: Just writing every entry. I mean, the thing about the book is they gave me, I think my original word limit was 80,000 words. And then I pretty much talked to them and was like, can I do 100,000, because there’s no way I can get it done in 80,000. So 100,000 was the new word limit, and then it ended up being like I don’t know 105,000, 110,000, it was somewhere around there.

I mean, they didn’t want the book to be too long, because a book that is too long is gonna sell a lot worse than a book that is not too long. I mean, when people are going into a bookstore, I don’t know what it is, people love to read, but for some reason, the longer the book is, the less copies you’re gonna sell, in most cases. So they didn’t want it to be much bigger than 100,000.

So if you’re thinking about it, 100,000 words, 100 entries, you’ve got 1,000 words per entry. So if you are somebody that does a lot of writing, 1,000 words, I got to write all of these entries about all of these people and all of these events in the history of WWF/WWE, but they all have to be 1,000 words or less. And it seems like that would make things easier, but it actually made it much harder.

Like, there were a lot of these entries where—like the Chris Jericho entry, for some reason the Chris Jericho entry was like 10,000 words or something like that, and like dude I gotta cut this down to 1,000 and I wanna try and hit all the major points, and I don’t want it to be like, you open the book and here’s Wikipedia in book form.

Like oh, this guy was this, this guy did that, then they did this. I mean obviously it’s gonna read like that to a little bit of a degree, but my idea was, I only have 1,000 words, so like what defines this person? What defines Chris Jericho? What angles? What moments? What matches?

I have to gloss over this. I can’t even mention that. I gotta hammer home this. So it was actually, when you look at the book and you open it up and you flip through it, it’s like “eh, that can’t be that hard, it’s like 100 entries about guys.” But it was actually very hard to try to get everything into really a very short space.