There’s a saying, attributed to more than one author, that you’ve got to write a million words before you’re ready for publication. If that’s true, and I’m inclined to believe it’s certainly part of the equation, then it’s proof – if any was needed – that writing is a long term goal.
Regardless of whether the exact number is a million, it still makes sense that in order to write something good enough for publication, you have to write, and write, and keep on writing. That’s because writing is like every other skill – the more of it you do and the more frequently you do it, the better at it you will be.
How long does it take to write one million words? I came back to writing in January after a long break and part of my plan was to keep a daily record of my output. In January my aim was just to get used to regularly writing again, and the result was a daily average of 308 words.
February was the start of the full commitment, and in that month I wrote an average of 1,185 words a day. So far in March, the daily average is 1,481. In April and May, the plan is for this to rise again, because I want to complete a (very rough) first draft of a novel before June.
Even at the March rate, I won’t reach my first million for another year and a half. That sounds like a long time, but it’s already three months closer than it was on the first of January.
The point is that you can’t get closer to achieving your goal without taking action. It’s just like Monty Python’s football team of philosophers: the Greek philosophers eventually won the match, not just by thinking through the solution, but by actually kicking the ball into the net.
There’s more to writing than just pumping out words though. And this is where the evidence from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers comes in. Gladwell found that it seems to take about 10,000 hours to achieve an expertise in any field.
If becoming a writer was only about putting words on paper, then 10,000 hours wouldn’t appear on the horizon for maybe a decade. But most writers only spend a small number of hours actually writing every day. On top of that is the re-drafting and editing of their work. And then there’s the thinking, planning and analysing.
There’s also a reasonable amount of time spent reading the work of other writers. The advice is that you should visit the library and borrow an armful of books from the genre you intend to write in. Then you read each book twice: first time it’s as a reader; then the second time it’s as a writer, looking for what made the book work and what didn’t. (I have to confess that the read twice rule is hard to stick with, so I read once, then skim through it again and write up my own notes on the book.)
With all of that contributing to the 10,000 hours for proficiency, the proportion actually spent writing thankfully is reduced to maybe 3,000 to 4,000 hours. Still over the horizon, but suddenly it feels within reach.
So, how many words a day is the write amount? The answer has to be different for each of us, depending on the time we have available.
For me, it began with 500 a day at the start of this year, and when I achieved that it became possible to reach 750 a day, and then 1,000. Now, it’s well on the way to 1,500.
There isn’t an exact number, but it is clear that the write amount is always going to be a moving target that stretches you a little more than it did in the previous month.