I recently passed a major milestone: I’ve written one million words of fiction. Reaching one million words has definitely been a journey. To put it in perspective:
I spent about 2,220 hours (the equivalent of 55.5 forty-hour work weeks) writing in order to get to one million words. (I average about 450 words—a little less than two pages—in an hour of writing. The 2,220 hours does not include time researching or outlining. That’s just time with fingers on the keyboard.)
I spent about 20 years building up to one million words. I’ve written most of my words (~75%) since establishing a writing habit about eight years ago.
One million words is about 4,000 pages. (The entire Harry Potter septology is 4,224 pages.)
Ten different projects make up those one million words. (Four works of fanfiction [totaling about 160k], an interactive fiction book for my family [about 40k], a NaNoWriMo novel [about 50k], a yet-to-be-completed novel [about 40k], and almost two full drafts of my current project—a sci-fi trilogy—totaling over 700k.)
My writing log.
According to some writers—Ray Bradbury among them—only now am I ready to start writing something worthwhile. I don’t believe that the number of words I’ve written magically makes me a semi-competent writer now—or that nothing I wrote before now was any good—but I do believe the blunt force trauma of writing day in, day out, for years has granted me two abilities that are essential to good writing:
My ability to detect crap in real-time has improved. I may not always be able (or patient enough) to fix the flaw in real-time but many times per writing session I am able to spot a problem and flag it so I can fix it later. This is especially nice when it saves me from writing myself into corners.
My discipline has improved. Seeing words add up day after day, year after year, is extremely reinforcing for me. As a result, when I sit down to write, I find myself drifting off-task less and less. I know the effort will pay off so it’s easier to put the effort in.
It’s been a journey so far. I’m excited to see what happens in my next million words.