1,000,000 words

[Chilari]

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?

 

[Androxine Vortex]

I am no where near being published but I have so many papers with notes on them that I can say I've written a good deal of words. I also make a lot of mistakes or just like to change things too.

 

[Butterfly]

I calculated mine a while ago... my ideas file (which alone is 250,000), plus several drafts of my current WIP (Draft 2, reaching 100,000, previous drafts 120,000 [before some major changes] x 4/5 - not sure really) as well as two abandoned projects from my teens which reached about 90,000, and the other more like 20,000) all this not including notes and guides I'm touching a million words.

I still find some chapters difficult to write, and I edit as I go until the draft is completed, then edit the whole thing again. But I'm the sort of gal, who really can't judge if anything I have written is any good. For me, if the words and the rhythm feels right, it probably is.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

I'm estimating, but probably 250k in novel length work, none of which I consider publishable, yet great learning experiences. They do make me cringe in spots though.

Maybe another 50k in short work... I never really concentrated on this aspect of writing. Although I am considering doing more of this type of work as "in between revision" projects.

Then, if you include months and months of background work, character story lines and the like, maybe another 25-40k. I think it's a stretch to include this sort of work, at least for my style of planning & outlining. It's not prose.

So all in all, approximately 300-350K.

I don't know about the 1,000,000 word mark but I understand what it's trying to say, similar to the 10,000 hours to become an expert at any task. I'd prefer to look at it as hours, as I'm a fairly slow writer, averaging about 600 words a day with a top end of 1800. In that way I can include the countless hours I've spent studying craft outside of actual writing. I believe that has sped up the "actual writing" learning process for me.

 

[Penpilot]

My numbers depend on how I slice things. My first novel I rewrote from scratch once so that's would add 130k to the book's eventual 270k final draft. Also I've also rewritten lots of short stories from scratch. One story I rewrote from scratch at least four times so does that count as 20k or just 5k? Taking all that into account along with my current novel, which is 110k, I'd say I've written anywhere from 450k to 600k

 

[celebathien]

Interesting. One question though (and I'm serious about this): is this counting everything you've ever written, or what you've put your hand to writing only as an adult? I ask because we've learned to write from a very young age, and most of us were actually writing essays on state exams and term papers/research papers as early as high school. Not to mention how many of us were also writing our own little stories as kids, even if they were a page long from beginning to end, for fun. Just wondering where we start counting the million?

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

I can only answer for me. I counted only fiction that I've written since becoming serious about writing... Nothing as a student, nothing as a hobbyist.

 

[Chilari]

I've been counting everything since I was 14, when I decided I wanted to be a writer. I had written stuff before that, probably a few tens of thousands of words, but that was the point I started writing with the idea of publication in my head. I have not counted any fiction I did not initiate, like schoolwork, and I have certainly not counted words written for essays, blog posts, articles, forum posts and the like. Only the fiction I have written on my own initiative and, for the higher count, the notes associated with those stories.

 

[tlbodine]

Oh, what fun! I'll play! Let's see...starting with my first "serious novel" (ie, the first thing I ever wrote after deciding, "I want to be a published writer!") I've written.....*digs out calculator* 400k in high-school novels + 235k for college-and-beyond novels + 35k in short stories + another 25k in a short story anthology I just finished. So that puts me at ~695k IF you're not counting revisions. I have absolutely no idea how many words of revisions I've spent. Some of those high school novels went through like nine drafts.

Add to that:
I've been roleplaying online pretty much non-stop for 15 years. I can't even begin to guess how many words I've written doing that. I have something on the order of 135 characters, and every one of them at one time or another had a web page with a backstory, not to mention the actual roleplaying I did with them.

And of course none of that is counting all the other writing I've done -- school assignments, blog posts, articles (I've written 1,500 articles in the past year alone for ye olde day job), sappy love letters, etc.

My take-aways:

-- Sometimes I wish I'd spent more of my roleplaying time on "serious" writing, because holy crap is it a huge time sink. On the other hand, it also taught me a few very valuable skills in characterization and plot. Melodramatic though RPs invariably are, the one thing they can never be is *dull*.

-- You learn more from finishing a novel than you do from starting it. You can learn a LOT from a finished bad novel.

-- Practice is good, but it's not everything. The ol' "butt in chair" philosophy is a good one, but only if you know what you're doing. You really do have to study the craft and try new things and stretch yourself.

-- If you're learning at the rate that your books are noticeably better written by the end than the beginning, such that you find yourself going back to fix the beginning, then THAT is better than the end, so then you fix the end, and then THAT'S better...and this continues for several drafts....you're not ready yet. but you're learning, so that's good. So stop writing that one stupid novel and start up something new instead of tinkering with 9 drafts of one book for five years.

...ok, maybe that last one is just for me.

 

[wordwalker]

-- You learn more from finishing a novel than you do from starting it. You can learn a LOT from a finished bad novel.

-- Practice is good, but it's not everything. The ol' "butt in chair" philosophy is a good one, but only if you know what you're doing. You really do have to study the craft and try new things and stretch yourself.

-- If you're learning at the rate that your books are noticeably better written by the end than the beginning, such that you find yourself going back to fix the beginning, then THAT is better than the end, so then you fix the end, and then THAT'S better...and this continues for several drafts....you're not ready yet. but you're learning, so that's good. So stop writing that one stupid novel and start up something new instead of tinkering with 9 drafts of one book for five years.

Definitely some lives to word by. "You learn more from finishing" ought to be our catchphrase for good learning plans; I can already think of several threads we should have said that in.

 

[Zero Angel]

I guess I count as a published author...
These are all going to be low-estimates because I have no desire (and sometimes no way) to go through old hand-written tomes and computer files.

I knew I wanted to be a writer ever since I learned to write in Kindergarten. My first original short was done in second grade and was around 14K. I won't start counting until I became serious in High School though:

The first NOVEL I ever wrote I was ~17 and it ended up being ~100,000. This was the novel itself, there was at least as much writing in ideas, settings, plots, character bios, etc. Not counting anything else I was doing at the time, I would lowball the word count at around 150,000.

Around writing this though, I began the project that would become War of the Ages. There was about half a novella written to start (which is set about 20 years after the events of my first published novel in the WotA universe), but I became enchanted by the setting and kept going back and back to write more and more. By around 2005, I would add another 100K in notes and settings and such. So we're up to 250K.

Then I finally found the character that would become the main character and wrote and wrote and wrote. Along the way of writing the first novel in WotA, The Throne of Ao, I also wrote around 20 short stories and three novellas, and a variety of essays/theses set in the world (along the lines of how books are in D&D games and Elder Scrolls games). The novel's first draft clocked in at 180K, but had been rewritten along the way several times, so I feel comfortable estimating this closer to 300K, and all of the side-material was an easy additional 300K (the first information file I typed up was 150K by itself, and really represents much less than half of what I had done up to that point). If you add in all the sound files I was leaving myself as "writing", then I'd probably reach another 50K.

So around 900K. I think I finished all of that around 2008/2009. Editing and rewriting and editing and rewriting and editing and rewriting and writing side stories and follow-up scenes and working into the next novel, I would estimate another 100K-200K, so by the time I published, I was at around 1M! Wow!

Then I published and got a couple reviews and realized there was more missed and easy fixes in things to be done in the published novel! AH!!!

Since 2011, I have a lot less time for writing (because of life and the number of jobs I have), so it was a struggle to find the time for the last few 10Ks. My sound files have grown geometrically

I also started branching out into nonfiction with my math series (which is frustratingly and, I guess, happily more successful than my darling WotA). I'm now around 1.1M or 1.15M.

Looking back, I sometimes can't recognize my writing. I did take to heart the fact that a writer will probably never be fully satisfied with their work and will always find things to tweak in any subset of their work no matter when it was written. I love my first published novel and I can't read a scene from around the halfway point without rabidly consuming the remainder of the novel, but I know that by the time the second novel is done, my skill will have been increased to the point that I probably won't want to read the first one. I'm not really worried by this, because I plan on doing an "author's cut" extended version around Book 3's release, and will probably rewrite large portions of the 1st novel around then.

I also would like to someday release my actual first novel and get the shorts and novellas I've written over the years into publishable shape.

I think many writers are afraid of releasing a work that is less than perfect, but well, everything is less than perfect. Can something be better? Of course it can. But I've never consumed ANY work from ANY one that I thought to myself, "There's not a single thing I would change about that." There's always something that makes me go, "Why didn't they do THIS?"

I'm hoping that by around 2M I will feel comfortable and not self-conscious about my writing, but to be honest with myself, I'm also hoping that I will never feel comfortable so that I keep getting better.

 

[DMHamilton]

I remember reading an article about the 10,000 hours of focussed practice required for mastery of something. I don't know where the 1,000,000 words total came from, but I think there's a lot more to mastery, or even competence than just a number. Surely time spent reading, plotting, thinking, is equally important to the actual word count.

In any event, I think trying to quantify these things is often applying an objective test to a subjective thing. Everyone's going to be different!

 

[Zero Angel]

I remember reading an article about the 10,000 hours of focussed practice required for mastery of something. I don't know where the 1,000,000 words total came from, but I think there's a lot more to mastery, or even competence than just a number. Surely time spent reading, plotting, thinking, is equally important to the actual word count.

In any event, I think trying to quantify these things is often applying an objective test to a subjective thing. Everyone's going to be different!

Well 10,000 hours spent writing would only be 100 words an hour...