1 Million Words (030)

1 Million Words! Have you written that many? Do you know, or are you guessing?

Thanks to the stats page for my first fandom account at AO3, I knew pretty close to the day when I went over the 1 million word mark officially. However, I'm fairly certain I had hit that mark years ago, given how many stories I have written since I was a kid. My first "book" was a Jack London rip-off titled Timber Trails and Wolf Wails (I was super proud of that title, dontchaknow) and was 40 single-spaced type written pages...I think I was nine or ten? Or so?

Unsurprisingly, most authors I know have similar tales about the stories they wrote when they were young! But then we get older and start believing that we need to write better before we can write more, which is a complete reversal of reality. In this podcast I talk about how setting any kind of quantitative goal (hours, word counts, timed sprints...whatever!) is the secret to honing your craft and finding your voice.

The parable of the "quantity vs. quality" pottery experiment/class is in the book Art & Fear by David Bayles.

Transcript:

The Author Alchemist Podcast
Episode 9, Season 2
Title: 1 Million Words

Main Intro:
I'm KimBoo, the host of The Author Alchemist podcast, I'm bringing my years of experience as both a fan fiction writer and a professionally published author to the problem, we all love to hate the act of writing, you can't improve on something that doesn't exist. Which means the most important thing you could do is simply write anything. Just write something. I'm here to help you do that. 

Podcast: 
And yes, this is KimBoo York, wide awake early in the morning. Actually, it's about 10 o'clock in the morning. So it's not that early, but it is for me. I am welcoming you back again to the Author Alchemist podcast. 

For regular listeners, I know there must be a few of you out there, this is going to be something that I've kind of alluded to in previous episodes. It's an idea I have about possibly forming a membership group down the road, that's later for 2022. The genesis of this and if you've read the title, you know that you write 1 million words as in the title so you know where we're going with this. 

The conversation always comes up over and over again, on book-twitter, on writer-twitter, on Tumblr, in, you know, writing groups I've been a part of: how much do you need to write? The answer, of course, is always "you need to write every day." That's been a popular answer for as long as I've been a writer. If you've read the Artist's Way, then you know that the daily morning pages are a critical component of that philosophy, that approach, to creativity for writing. And if you don't know, if you aren't familiar with them, it's simply the idea that you write first thing when you get up and first thing. That don't mean after you've gotten up and had your coffee and walked the dog and used the bathroom or brushed your teeth, it means literally sitting up when your alarm goes off, grabbing a notebook and a pen or a pencil and writing three pages in your journal or your notebook. I think the assumption too, is that it's a full size notebook. It's not like one of those teeny tiny, you know, A-5 little notebooks. That's actual three pages of something like a legal pad. 

Over and over again, as a writer, you hear the refrain: write every day, write every day. I'm here today on this podcast, which you may not be listening to anytime soon but hopefully, you are rolling along with me as we go through all of these podcasts, I'm here to say that your goal should be write 1 million words. I prefer this to the "write every day" goal. And they may work together as well. Although they do work well, in tandem, after all, you can write every day to get to 1 million words. 

But not everybody can write every day. And I mean that in a very factual way. There are people who are dealing with mental health issues, or they're dealing with chronic physical body health issues. They're dealing with disability. They're dealing with having young children in the house, they're dealing with moving, they're dealing with elderly parents, they're dealing with, you know, life in general. It is a privilege to be able to write every day. And so we have to look at the practice of writing sometimes through the lens of what would work best for as many people as possible. 

And truly, yes, writing every day will get you to your goal. It will make you a better writer, de facto, because you are practicing it every day. That is true for any art. But again, if you can't practice every day, if your brain doesn't work that way, if your life doesn't work that way, what is the goal you can aim for? And I think writing 1 million words is a great one. 

I built this off of my own experiences. I'm not just pulling this number out of a hat. And I think I probably wrote 1 million words long before I had the math to support the fact that I had actually written 1 million words. After all, I've been writing stories since the time I could start actually reading, which I guess is about six years old. As we've gone over before in the past, I was a late bloomer! So I know I wrote a lot prior to actually keeping track of how many words I was writing. And in fact, to be honest with you, I wasn't keeping track of how many words I was writing. The Archive of Our Own (AO3) was doing that for me. I was astounded the day I discovered the statistics page on my original AO3 account. I know some people are kind of obsessed with that page, and numbers and things like that. I'm not. I checked it a few times as I went along, like, "Oh, I've written 200,000 words, oh, I've written 500,000 words." And then one day I checked, and I'd written a little bit over 1 million words. 

And when I had done that, at the point where I tipped over into 1 million words, was also roughly about the time I was starting to publish, or have published at the time through a publisher, my own novels. I do not think that was a coincidence. I've talked before how going into fanfiction, or re-entering the fanfiction world, like coming like coming back or re-entering into orbit or something like that, really set me on the path of becoming a writer, as a person, not just somebody who writes sometimes, which I really was before that even though writing was an important part of my identity, and I'd written fanfiction, and written original stories. That was all just kind of on the side and reasons I didn't pursue it professionally. 

After I spent all that time writing all those stories, I realized I had a voice. I had come into my own writing, with my own style and my own practice. And my own perspective. I really do believe that writing 1 million words was what got me there. Does it really matter at which point precisely in time, I hit the 1 million word mark? As I said, before I hit the 1 million word mark — definitely long before those numbers showed up on my AO3  profile statistics page — but knowing at that point, that I'd written that many words, gave me the confidence. 

And trust in my own writing that had been absent before then. It's like, I wrote 1 million words, I can write another 1 million words, I can do this. And people will read my stories and love them — which is important to me, may or may not be your goal. But that was important to me. 

An alternative metric, of course, is the 10,000 hours metric, which was really popular a few years ago when it was first, you know, revealed into the world. As you know, you become a "master" of something after you have 10,000 hours of practice. It's been debunked a little bit over time, I think. Honestly it's still a pretty good rule of thumb, you can't do something for 10,000 hours and be bad at it. Unless you're working really hard to be bad at it, you're going to learn something over the course of time. 

There's also the experiment that was done that a lot of people talk about, "the quality versus the quantity", where a researcher gave people a task to create clay pots, and they broke it into groups where one was going to be judged on quality, how good the final clay pot was. And the one other group was judged on quantity, not just how many clay pots they made, but actual weight. I thought that was interesting when I read about it, that what he used as the metric was how many pounds of clay did your clay pots weigh. That was the quantity not just the number, but the weight. So very, very, you know, precise measurements of what is the quantity involved here. And in the end, it was decided, it was seen, I guess judged by people who do pottery, that the people who did the quantity, who were just making pots one after another to try to use up as much clay as possible, actually ended up making better pots, better designs, better stability, just better clay pots overall than the ones who spent a lot of time in the theory and the design and trying to make the one perfect pot. 

So yes, there are lots of ways to quantify your progress. By quality, by quantity, by hours, by how many words you write, by whether you're writing every day. Any of those will do. I'm not saying that my 1 million words goal is the perfect solution, but I think for writers, it is easy to quantify, especially if you're using tools, digital tools, such as Google Drive, or Scrivener or AO3, posting your work there. There are ways to count those words and figure out how many you've written. 

And of course, it's going to take a while. I did the math that I think is like, if you do write every day, and you write 500 words a day, it'll take five and a half years to get to 1 million words. If you write 1000 words a day, of course, it will take two and a half years, give or take to get to 1 million words. And that can be a little defeating. But I think the goal here is to remember, kind of like 10,000 hours, it's not necessarily that you're trying to hit that particular mark, but you're aiming in that particular direction, of whether you write every day 500 or 1000 words, or whether you write once a week, and you write 500 or 10,000 words in that setting. The point is that you're moving forward to the goal, not because it is an end goal in and of itself. But the act of going there is what's going to improve your writing, give you more confidence in yourself, and allow you to expand your creativity, to explore a bunch of new things that you had never even contemplated, when you first sat down to write your first fanfic, or your first original short story, or your first original poem. I don't know, whatever gets you off, my friend. 

That's what you need to be doing. Whatever you decide to do as a goal, whether it's to write every day, or to aim for 1 million words, I don't want you to think of it as your only goal for that reason, like it's easy to get really wrapped up in hitting the numbers. And in that sense, just the idea of writing every day is kind of low key, except for when it isn't, and it's really stressful. Even I don't write every day. And I try to, for me writing every day works really well. But again, it's a little ephemeral, and it's not as concrete of a goal have something to aim for, that I feel like will make a difference. So of course now at this point, I'm working on my next 2 million words, whether it's actually made me a better writer or not, I'll leave for others to decide. But for me personally, I think it has made the writing process easier and it has (subjectively of course) I think being by writing better, it's allowed me to move on to more complex stories that I want to tell. And to me that's important. 

As I said at the start, this is something that I eventually want to turn into a group project or a membership project, the 1 million words club where you know, we come together as a community and aim for writing 1 million words, however you want to track that. Kind of a more low key ongoing thing than NaNoWriMo which is 50,000 words over the course of one month. Which is obviously very doable. I think that comes out to a little bit over 1300 words a day, which once you get in the groove is actually not hard to write that much. But to write that much every day is a challenge,  I'm not gonna say it isn't. So with the idea of creating a community where our goal is to write 1 million words together and I'd even be willing to start from scratch and and just you know, jump in like everybody else with the number zero or possibly you can count your fanfiction numbers to that...and I could possibly, that's an interesting thought because like I could...I have my old AO3 account which is under Cooper west but my new AO3, which is KimBoo York, and I haven't been anywhere near that much for that account. A few "Nirvana in Fire" fanfic and things like that, but nothing, nothing quite as intense and long range as my original fanfic fiction archive which goes back to I think 2007 at this point, truly some humiliatingly embarrassing fanfic on that account. And, but, you know, it's up there. I wrote it. It got me where I am today, so I can't be too upset about it. Right. Think about it. 

As I close out this podcast, just please think about what kind of goals you are setting for yourself, if they really fit the way you live and the way your brain works. If writing every day is a challenge for you, and not accomplishing that, is defeating you, and making you feel like you're not a writer and feeling like you're, you're just, you're not, you're not living up to your potential and feeling shame for not meeting that one goal, it's time to consider changing the goal. If writing every day isn't going to work for you, think of the 10,000 hours metric. If that doesn't work for you think of the 1 million words metric. Go back to the experiment I was talking about earlier, I tried to find a link for that for the show notes. But about the pottery, where quantity versus quality, sometimes the quantity, oftentimes the quantity will get you to the quality faster than just focusing on writing the one perfect sentence. And then going on to writing the next perfect sentence. 

I have friends who have spent decades writing a single book because they are looking for the perfect words. Maybe that's what you want to do, too. I'm not saying that that's the wrong way to go about it. It's working for them. Again, think about your own personal goals. Think about what you can do, what you're willing to commit to, and what makes you feel good about writing. You can't write if you coming from a place of shame, and anger and frustration. I mean, you could write a journal entry about that about how angry and frustrated you are and how that makes you feel ashamed. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about writing fictional stories, and using your creative energies in a positive way. So let's keep the focus on that for now. Do some journaling and talk to your therapist about all the other stuff. That's not what I'm here for. But certainly, I'm here to help you pull out of that and get on to writing 1 million words. 

So that's it for today's episode. Thanks for listening along. Trying to kick these out a little bit more regularly. I say that every single time don't I? It's terrible. By the time this goes live, though, the course that I've been working on and working on and working on working on out from fanfiction will be available for purchase. That is love child of mine, I've been working on it, but the idea came to me years ago, but I've actually been working on putting it together. All last fall. It's the first online course I've ever done. So if you do take it, please be a little forgiving. I'm trying to figure out how to do all of it. But it is pretty intense. It is for people who are having difficulty with the writing aspect of jumping from fanfiction to original fiction. It's not a marketing thing. It's not telling you how to self publish. It's about the writing and how to make writing original fiction as much fun and as engaging and as rewarding as writing fanfiction because writing original fiction can get frustrating really quickly. And you don't have those automatic rewards centers such as immediate reader feedback that will help you get over the humps and fanfiction. So if that's where you're at with your original writing, I hope you check out the course. I'll be having some specials on it. And if you like it, let me know. If it's not for you then tell me what kind of course you are looking for. Again, I'm not necessarily the craft maven, I am the motivation maven. So let me know what you're looking for. Maybe we can get a course together for you and help you out. So take care be well and you know, go get some writing done. 

Outro:
Thanks for listening to me ramble on about writing here on their Author Alchemist Podcast. I'm KimBoo York and I hope this episode has helped clear away the cobwebs from your inspiration. For more podcasts and other tools including self paced online courses, please visit my website at www.authoralchemist.com or email me at KimBoo@authoralchemist.com I'd love to read your questions and feedback. Now it's time to get some writing done.