I recently worked out that I must have reached the one million words of fiction written mark sometime in the last year or so. Adding it up, there’s a couple early 100k novels (unpublished), a 400k trilogy (unpublished), about 100k worth of short stories (some published, some not), another 120k novel (unpublished, but I’m planning to shop this one around to agents and publishers), about 80k worth of novellas (unpublished) and another 100k novel (just recently finished).
It adds up to around about one million words. The adage (often attributed to Ray Bradbury although the version he gives in Zen and the Art of Writing is slightly different) runs:
You need to write one million words of crap before you’ll write a single good one.
I wonder which word was my first good one then? Ah well. And besides, some of us have more crap to work out of the system that others so who knows… I might still need another few hundred or thousand words. Best get back to it.
