A few weeks back, I was in Calgary for When Words Collide. During the three-day conference, I attended many workshops and chatted with many authors, publishers, and readers. During an interesting conversation with a fellow author, she asked me how I started writing, where I learned the craft, how many books I wrote before I landed my first publishing contract. She had read somewhere that a writer should have written at least a million words before considering herself ready to write a decent book.
A million words? That sounded like a lot of words, so I reflected on the path I followed, the twisted path that led me to become a published author.
I scribbled as a teenager, but my real journey started fourteen years ago when I began writing stories for fun and posted them for free on the Internet for others to enjoy. In four years, I wrote twenty-nine stories. I cringe when I reread some of them. Most of the plots were good, but the writing was...awful, atrocious, brutal, especially in the early stories. By the time I wrote the twenty-ninth, I had improved by giant leaps and bounds. I felt ready to tackle my first "real" novel.
That first novel "Salvaged", which took nine months to write, must not have been too shabby since it won a writing contest and I was offered my first publishing contract. From there I ended up publishing many more novels, but it didn't stop that conversation about a million words from following me home this week. Had I been ready or simply lucky, or maybe a bit of both?
To answer that question, I decided to comb through these twenty-nine free stories. The shortest one was 1,013 words, and the longest 128,982 words. Four of them were above 100,000 words. They average 46,818 words per story for a grand total of...1,357,732 words. I was shocked I'd written way over one million words before I "started" writing for "real".
One of my former editors asked me once why I wasted four years writing stories for free. At the time, I didn't have an answer, except maybe "it was fun". Writing this post today made me realize I didn't waste my time writing these stories. Without knowing it, I was practicing my craft, testing what worked and didn't work, honing my skills, finding my voice...
Thanks to these 1,357,732 words scribbled for no other reason than pure enjoyment, I became an author.
A million words? That sounded like a lot of words, so I reflected on the path I followed, the twisted path that led me to become a published author.
I scribbled as a teenager, but my real journey started fourteen years ago when I began writing stories for fun and posted them for free on the Internet for others to enjoy. In four years, I wrote twenty-nine stories. I cringe when I reread some of them. Most of the plots were good, but the writing was...awful, atrocious, brutal, especially in the early stories. By the time I wrote the twenty-ninth, I had improved by giant leaps and bounds. I felt ready to tackle my first "real" novel.
That first novel "Salvaged", which took nine months to write, must not have been too shabby since it won a writing contest and I was offered my first publishing contract. From there I ended up publishing many more novels, but it didn't stop that conversation about a million words from following me home this week. Had I been ready or simply lucky, or maybe a bit of both?
To answer that question, I decided to comb through these twenty-nine free stories. The shortest one was 1,013 words, and the longest 128,982 words. Four of them were above 100,000 words. They average 46,818 words per story for a grand total of...1,357,732 words. I was shocked I'd written way over one million words before I "started" writing for "real".
One of my former editors asked me once why I wasted four years writing stories for free. At the time, I didn't have an answer, except maybe "it was fun". Writing this post today made me realize I didn't waste my time writing these stories. Without knowing it, I was practicing my craft, testing what worked and didn't work, honing my skills, finding my voice...Thanks to these 1,357,732 words scribbled for no other reason than pure enjoyment, I became an author.
Happy reading!
JS
.jpg)
.jpg)
