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Three years
ago today I started a personal project to write 1,000,000 words. This was inspired by the adage that, “the
first 1,000,000 words is practice”.
Since that time I have logged movie reviews, half-finished novels,
random bullshit, and lots of grad school assignments. I have thru this time kept a log of how many
I have written. Starting at first with a
goal of 500 words each day, under the reasoning that some professional authors
write as much as 1,800 words each day.
That was optimistic in the extreme.
I quickly
fell behind and even as I banged out huge assignments at school and tried to
write down something about more and more of the shows I watched less and less
stuff interested me as targets and I personally felt less creative in a lot of
ways.
My first
year doing this I logged 139,441 words.
This doesn’t include facebook statuses, tweets, or comments in forums
(unless I later turn those into blog entries).
It is work that I either put out into the world to be evaluated via
school and this blog, or it was work that I wanted to one day put out in a
grander form to be evaluated. This
worked out to 382 words each day. Close
to the 400 words a day I have seen recommended by Neil Gaiman an author whose
work I hold in great esteem.
In the
second year I kept up the pace for the most part. 134,511 words. Much of which came from a single massive
assignment to complete my first Master’s degree. A lot more math was required at this point,
with hours of time spent hammering out projections and breakdowns as part of a
political evaluation for my degree.
Writing was less a priority and less a part of my day to day functions. Overall this was a step down, but was still
in the same range of 368 words each day.
This last
year has been less a step down and more of a ladder down. I didn’t feel nearly as creative; most of my
school work was doing basic learning in a foreign language or using mathematics,
mapping, and design tools; and even the yearly movie reviews I typically do
just to drive up my word count… I didn’t feel the drive to put them out there
as most of the movies I saw last year fell into the very grey middle for me and
hardly required comment (though there have so far been two exceptions). I was and still kind of am mentally burnt
out. I only wrote 46,886 words in the
last year. A third of what I have done
in the past. 128.5 words each day…
Except that is wrong, it was only 128.1 because I have to include a leap day. This is only the 5th blog I have
written in 2016 and it is April.
Now that
isn’t the whole story, I have been writing more in forums, discussion sections,
and comments on various websites so that lets out a lot of ideas before they
have fully developed. Maybe those pasts
are letting out too much creative energy and I should give up on that talkative
aspect of my online self. Maybe those
posts are good enough to consider as real writing effort and I should start
counting longer or more in depth posts toward my log. I will probably compromise and start turning
more of them into blogs, the one from yesterday is an example of that.
I have also stopped counting the
fiction I write until it is finished, which means that a dozen chapters of a
novel that will never get done, those thousands of words go nowhere. I have also not been sharing or measuring
stuff for when I write a setting for Dungeons and Dragons, which can translate
to thousands of words. Maybe I should
start putting out lots of stuff related to my Dungeons and Dragons imaginings. Perhaps my actual word count is not as bad as
I think.
It is not
like the exercise is not doing its job.
My writing is much better than it was.
I rarely need a second draft, and aside from the numerous typos I feel
that my thoughts are coming thru in clear waves to those who read my
stuff. Heck, before I started logging my
word count I was blogging in the note section of my facebook in a deliberate
effort just to hammer out more words for fear that I would be too glib for
success in graduate school (some of those old entries are on here, upgraded a
small amount, artifacts when I only wrote about comic book characters).
Oh, for the
halcyon days when a 1,345 word blog about Black Panther was the longest I had
ever written. Compare that to the 6 part epic I did on the Florida Legislature and the need for a new Parliamentary
system to combat Gerrymandering. Or if
you want to stick to comics the 8 part series I did on just making up 3 different teams of DC superheroes to be Justice Leagues.
What I am
saying is, I have most definitely met goals of improving both the verbosity and
virtue of my writing. Though I am sure many
of my Professors remain unimpressed.
I do hope
that in the future I get a job that requires regular writing as part of the job’s
function. I feel that prodding is
important, and being paid for writing is the right sort of positive association
that will keep me writing recreationally.
And maybe this next year I will be able to push myself to write
something with enough substance that even if it is not great in volume it will
be greater in quality.
For now I
will just have to keep writing. And get
thru this patch.
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