One Million Words, Ten Thousand Hours

Here’s something you’ve heard before: your first draft goes in the trash. It’s a painful but important truth about writing. In fact, modern wisdom says that the first million words that you write will be terrible. Looking back at my own work, I can’t help but agree with that. It takes practice, passion, and dedication to polish your writing to the point of pride.

So let’s talk about those first million words.

In my senior year of high school, my capstone class had a substitute teacher for a few days. During that time, we talked about my aspirations as a writer and what genres I wanted to work in. And what I always remember about this man, who must’ve been sixty or seventy years old at the time, was that he told me that he wanted to write a book, but not until he had something to say.

Think about that. What would that look like? An older man contemplates the society he lives in, decides he wants to write the next 1984 or Animal Farm, and he sits down and he starts writing. He’s never created a character before. He’s never designed a plot. He’s never depicted character relationships, conflicts, or internal monologue. That book is going to be a disaster. It’s going to be made of cardboard and scotch tape. His dialogue will be stiff, his themes cartoonishly exaggerated, and his plot forced.

The quandary we always face is that it’s a terrible, heartbreaking thing to believe that what you’re writing won’t go anywhere. From your very first story, creative writing comes from the heart, and you want to believe that other people will see it as you do. It’s discouraging, and it makes getting through those words difficult. If it won’t go anywhere, then what’s the point? That’s why I think it’s important to understand what you’re doing with that time and effort.

I firmly believe that writing fiction requires a combination of maturity and practice. There’s a vast array of skills that a writer has to develop, but let’s talk about a few key ones that come with early practice: emotions, characters, plot, and theme. That’s a lot to talk about, so I’ll be spreading it over a few posts instead of creating one triple-length article.

Topic number one:

Emotions are, of course, the beating heart of fiction. They’re the goalpost. Everything else is designed to drive you towards those emotions, and it’s very difficult because there are so many moving parts. As a writer, you want to hone in on emotions that will resonate with your reader, and you make those heartstrings thrum.

That’s a skill. That is the skill of writing. As a young writer, you’re learning how to find those points of connection. Experimenting with characters, relationships, and plots will help you discover the scenes that you love the most, which will, eventually, become the stars of your writing. You might spend years writing terrible romances before you figure out what you want out of those stories – if you want your romance to be soft and soothing, or if you want the thrill of danger, or love in the face of tragedy. It’s a form of trial and error. In the end, it’s fairly simple: you already know what stories you like, but now you need to figure out what you like about them, because you’re going to need to synthesize those emotions in your own work.

I’m going to use my own writing history as an example. I’m no professional, but I am a few million words in, which has to count for something.

My first Fanfiction.net account was Aurora Borealis 97. It’s godawful. Don’t read any of it. I was thirteen. But there are some early dynamics that I explored then that I can still read into my writing today: it had my first experiments with magical empathy, a dozen attempts at dealing with the fallout of trauma and tragedy, and a few attempts at worldbuilding in the name of adding context.

Jamie Shade’s magical empathy would later turn into Ciel Phantomhive’s magical empathy (another weird artifact from my early teens) which would turn into Synchronization, featuring a set of weapon spirits that communicated entirely with emotions. It’s an experiment in human connection and universal language that I suspect hasn’t reached its conclusion.

The reveal fics and ‘worst memory’ stories that plagued my Danny Phantom obsession would eventually grow into a fascination with trauma and recovery that now spans hundreds of thousands of words. Mid-teen works like Contact Comfort, Cold Days, and Building Elysium helped me hone in on that interest, and most of my later works, such as What Does a Deviant Fear?, Honey Nut, and Constellations finally have me exploring those topics with maturity and skill.

Finally, my early worldbuilding lore had me trying to take a non-human group and give them legends, biology, and psychology. As I refined this skill over time, I would eventually learn how to model these ideas after real-life equivalents, making them both more detailed and more sincere.

All of which is to say: that early exploration was a vital part of my journey as a writer. I know that it’s hard to go in expecting to fail, and honestly, I’m not sure I would’ve made it through my early years if I’d realized how bad I was at it. But you’re doing important work. You’re learning about yourself. You can’t be a writer without having done that.

I’ll continue next week with a discussion about learning to create compelling characters. If you have any questions, comments, or requests, I’d love for you to drop a note below!