It has been said that it takes an author a million words to write their first novel. A million words of making mistakes, of learning, or making progress until they're good enough to sell it.
Recently, I took this to heart and added up the words I've written, sometimes based on wordcounts in files that exist, other times based on estimates and memory where files don't exist or where they were handwritten, and I came to a total a few thousand short of half a million. Unsure whether notes files, planning and so on counted, I added those along with various fanfictions I've written and it came to just shy of 900,000, again using estimations for anything lost or handwritten.
The largest chunks of the half million words of original fiction came from two novels. One reached 78,000 words in first draft, and I had a couple more drafts of about 10,000 each plus some alternative scenes of anywhere between 500 and 8,000 words. The second reached 50,000 words in first draft, 35,000 in second draft, and had over 40 alternative scenes, most of them towards the end, varying from 1,000 to 12,000 words. That one alone had over 180,000 words on it; the former had about 140,000. The rest of the half million was made up of stories that never got far, almost all under 10,000 words with one at 28,000 and another at 13,000.
Including fanfiction but excluding notes, planning and worldbuilding, I get to about 580,000 words of fiction.
I feel I'm at a point now where what I am writing is, if not ready for publication, not far off; with input from beta readers and editors, it could be just about good enough to self-publish and ask the lowest Amazon ebook sale price for (US$0.99 or GB£0.77). I haven't hit the million, and I won't for a while yet, but I feel like as a writer I'm nearly there.
I think that reading a lot of writing advice here on this forum and elsewhere on the internet, discussing writing with other writers and working through certain problems more quickly as a result has meant that the million word mark isn't, for me, where I need to get before I can publish. I think the million word mark is an average, the top of the bell curve, and that just volume alone does not a good writer make. But it is a useful benchmark for experience, if nothing else.
So what I'd like to know is - how many words have you written? For those of you who are published, how many words had you written at the time at which you published? How much have you written since, and how do you feel those extra words have improved your writing since you hit the million or published? What factors mean a writer can "beat the million" as it were and gain a degree of success before reaching a million words of fiction? What factors contribute to writers needing more than a million to get there?
Recently, I took this to heart and added up the words I've written, sometimes based on wordcounts in files that exist, other times based on estimates and memory where files don't exist or where they were handwritten, and I came to a total a few thousand short of half a million. Unsure whether notes files, planning and so on counted, I added those along with various fanfictions I've written and it came to just shy of 900,000, again using estimations for anything lost or handwritten.
The largest chunks of the half million words of original fiction came from two novels. One reached 78,000 words in first draft, and I had a couple more drafts of about 10,000 each plus some alternative scenes of anywhere between 500 and 8,000 words. The second reached 50,000 words in first draft, 35,000 in second draft, and had over 40 alternative scenes, most of them towards the end, varying from 1,000 to 12,000 words. That one alone had over 180,000 words on it; the former had about 140,000. The rest of the half million was made up of stories that never got far, almost all under 10,000 words with one at 28,000 and another at 13,000.
Including fanfiction but excluding notes, planning and worldbuilding, I get to about 580,000 words of fiction.
I feel I'm at a point now where what I am writing is, if not ready for publication, not far off; with input from beta readers and editors, it could be just about good enough to self-publish and ask the lowest Amazon ebook sale price for (US$0.99 or GB£0.77). I haven't hit the million, and I won't for a while yet, but I feel like as a writer I'm nearly there.
I think that reading a lot of writing advice here on this forum and elsewhere on the internet, discussing writing with other writers and working through certain problems more quickly as a result has meant that the million word mark isn't, for me, where I need to get before I can publish. I think the million word mark is an average, the top of the bell curve, and that just volume alone does not a good writer make. But it is a useful benchmark for experience, if nothing else.
So what I'd like to know is - how many words have you written? For those of you who are published, how many words had you written at the time at which you published? How much have you written since, and how do you feel those extra words have improved your writing since you hit the million or published? What factors mean a writer can "beat the million" as it were and gain a degree of success before reaching a million words of fiction? What factors contribute to writers needing more than a million to get there?