WTF One Million Words?
It's simple: the more you intentionally practice a skill set, the better you get
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
Last week I announced that my new membership community will be launching soon (hopefully on Jan. 12th!). The 1 Million Words Club is going to be a different kind of writer’s group, one focused more on getting the words out than on studying craft.
Honestly, there are so many writer’s groups out there already that focus on craft, mindset, and business, whether they be genre-specific or dedicated to a specific approach to writing or focused on the path to publishing.
Those kinds of groups are pretty good at holding writers accountable, but there are few places where the focus is primarily on productivity. And that’s a major oversight, imho!
I have been a part of a lot of different groups and writing challenges, and I also work with writers in my role as a productivity coach. All of that experience led me to realize that the most important thing writers need to do is write regularly and write more, and yet it is the hardest commitment to make and stick with.
Complaining about wanting to write more while not actually writing more is endemic to writing communities everywhere. It is the most difficult assignment that writing instructors give to their students. There are so many memes about procrastinating on our writing, it’s a cliché!
Yet, in the end, writing more is how we get better. It’s required. We can read as many craft books as we want but unless we are putting in the word count, we will never improve our skills.
I know you know this. We all do. We make unrealistic promises (write every single damn day! Write 1,000 words a week! Write for hour every morning! A novel every six months!) and then fail at meeting them. Get defeated. Stop writing entirely. Kick ourselves around. Start writing again. Make unrealistic promises again…and so it goes…
There are very few resources out there focused on increasing word counts, the primary (only?) one I know of being the popular app 4thewords, which gamifies the writing process. I’ve found fanfic challenges/exchanges to be great motivators for writing more, usually with a lot of encouragement from fellow fanfiction writers. And of course, there is the annual productivity fest that is NaNoWriMo (or there used to be, not sure what its status is after all that scandal).
Personally, though, I wanted to have a resource that was not a game or relied on a points system, or existed on a deadline. I’ve belonged to a few discord servers that featured sprint bot channels and the like, and really appreciated them, but they were often either fandom or genre focused.
I felt like there had to be other ways to create a community of writers that is supportive, interactive, and is available 24/7/365.
The 1 Million Words Club is my answer to that need!
Okay, so now you might be asking: Why did I chose 1 million words as a goal?
I've talked about this in a lot of different places, but it essentially boils down to the fact that the more you practice a skill set, the better you get at it.
I know, I know, that is so obvious that it seems like it does not bear repeating. I know!!! But writers in general are creatures who are very good at not doing the thing we love to do. We could delve into the why of that, but that is so individual a reason for each of us it would take more than one blog post to cover. (I mean, you can if you want to; I do personal 1:1 coaching if that’s more your speed!)
A rule of thumb that became popular a while ago claimed that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill set. This has since been challenged over the years, with a lot of arguments about whether it is true or not. There is also an important aspect of the claim that is often glossed over, which is that just doing something over and over again without proper training or coaching will just teach you how to do it wrong.
Ten thousand hours of practice isn’t a magic spell, in other words.
Yet, on the whole, I consider it to be it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. If you study a thing intently and practice it religiously for 10,000 hours, chances are high that you will become damn good at the thing.
But for writers, it becomes a slippery goal because of the question “what really counts toward the 10,000 hours?” Obviously, the time when you're typing or dictating counts, but does editing count? Does rewriting count? Does research count? How do we account for ideation, that very ephemeral concept, where we are spending hours (and days and weeks and months) thinking about our story without actually looking like we're doing anything?
As I considered this, I remembered the point where I realized I had written at least one million words. It happened by accident, actually. The Archive of Our Own fanfiction archive has a feature that tracks your stats, which to be honest, I generally I ignore. I don’t write fanfic to “hit the numbers,” after all. But I remember the day I stumbled over my stats and saw that I'd written over one million words of fanfiction. I felt both amazed and unnerved by it. What a huge number!
Now, obviously, I've written a lot more than that when you factor in all the original stories I've been writing since I was a child, as well as my work as a journalist and technical writer. There's a good chance this was my second one million words!
But nonetheless, the number struck me hard. I realized how much I had grown into my writing voice, and all the things I had learned about storytelling over years just by doing the thing that damn much.
I started making it a challenge for my writing productivity clients, and saw how motivational it was for them to have such a concrete goal. It is a commitment that can be met in any way that you write (every day, once a week, in fits and starts, in huge chunks) and in every type of writing (fiction, non-fiction, poems, etc.). It’s not a contest, because we are all aiming for the same number, nor does it matter if this is your first one million words, or your fifth one million words.
Importantly, though, it’s not a shortcut. There are way too many advice books out there promising writers easy victory over the writing process, and I will not make empty promises like that.
But it does work. In the 1 Million Words Club, there is no one specific story structure you have to follow. There is no specific technique you need to use. There is no particular schedule required. It works whether you are a planner or a pantser. It works if you're writing fiction or nonfiction.
It works because you use the techniques that fit your creative process, whether you write 150 words every day of the year, or 10,000 words in a month, or something in between.
Writing with a goal of hitting one million words holds you accountable to something bigger than a single story idea, or the goal to “get published,” or any transitory deadline you’ve set for yourself.
It puts you on the right track: writing more so that you can become a better writer. It's not a guarantee, but it is an important part of your creative journey.
If you've got a goal of one million words, then you've got a target and a reason to keep writing. The 1 Million Words Club can help you do just that!
productivity is so important! Gotta keep up the flow or everything grinds to a halt.