“The first million words are practice.”
Many Authors
I found this quote attributed to Stephen King, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Asimov, and David Eddings before I gave up Googling. Someone said it, surely. And regardless of who said it, it got me thinking: how many words have I written?
The thing is, I can’t remember a time before I was writing. I have journals with handwriting in them so atrocious adult-me has no clue what kid-me was trying to get down on the page. I also have vague recollections that I wrote stories about hermit crabs I once owned (RIP Tiger and Tyke), told in the perspective of the hermit grabs, and these were great hits in my class. I have no evidence these exist, but they are fundamental to my story-teller headcanon none the less. I must have written one million words by now.
I had a computer in my room from a young age, (in the 90s and early 2000s, this was rare, for all you whipper-snappers out there) and luckily I have always been a digital hoarder. So, I started tallying all the stories I half-wrote in my youth. I was constantly generating ideas as a kid. There are dozens of word documents with less than 500 words in them, embers of stories that never burned bright enough for me to return to them. Overall, from roughly 2000 through 2009, I wrote 447,468 words. Almost half a million. So far so good!
Since 2009 I’ve written another 405,447 words. About half of that is dedicated to the fourth draft of my current work-in-progress I rewrote last year. This brings my grand total up to: 852,915 words.
Now, this 850,000+ does not account for academic papers or handwritten journals. It also excludes the text-based roleplaying I used to do on forums of the young and boundless internet (yes, I’m that level of nerdy). If it were possible to include those as well, and if social media counts as writing, I’d wager I’d be well over the one million words unknown authors implore are practice.
So…what?
What if I’d definitely already written one million words? What if I’d barely written a thousand?
Some of your best stories might lay inside those first million words. There should be no gatekeepers to telling stories. There may be best practices for how you, or I, individually, write stories down and share them. And yes, of course, more words equal more time spent with your craft. Learning your voice, honing your style, practicing technique. But those first million words matter every bit as much as whatever is supposed to come after.
No matter how many or how few words you have under your belt: keep writing. The world needs your stories.
-M