A Million Words, A Million Seeds

The Grotta homestead in Esmond, South Dakota

The garden is in a stage of intense growth. I haven’t harvested much besides chives. But plants will produce eventually, gradually building to a late summer harvest of quantities of vegetables.

In writing, this period might be when a writer is putting lots of words down, but not completing stories. Or sending stories out into the world, but not achieving publication.

No one can seem to pin down the origin of the writing advice that you don’t get good until you’ve written a million words. Or how that is defined. But one blogger did attempt to discover who uttered the often quoted advice first, believing it might have been Ray Bradbury.

What does one million words equal? Ten 100,000 word books, which are approximately 400 pages each. Or thirteen 300 page books. You don’t need to have that many books published. You just need to write the equivalent of that many books. Easy, right?

Malcolm Gladwell presented the idea in his book Outliers that it requires 10,000 hours of practice in a field in order to develop world-class skill. That equals 250 forty hour weeks. Approximately five years. But who writes forty hours a week? Even if you’re truly diligent, figure twenty hours a week, and it’ll take you ten years to achieve Gladwell’s goal.

That rings true for me. I published my first paid work in 2012. Many years before that, I was plugging away at fiction, and for many years after, fitting writing around the day job and family obligations.

At this point in life, I have written a million words, and then some. I’ve put in more than 10,000 hours. I just now feel I’m hitting my stride writing fiction. I’m a slow learner and writer. Hopefully your journey will be much speedier.

And the garden? It has taken me years to achieve the level of competency I now enjoy. Even so, I have much to learn about gardening. I have put in less hours trying to grow vegetables and flowers than I have writing fiction. I’m fortunate I don’t rely on my ability to grow food to survive, unlike my farmer ancestors (photo of my Norwegian immigrant great-grandparents' homestead in South Dakota).

If you’re just starting out, either writing fiction or gardening, don’t be discouraged. Time will pass swiftly. You’ll look back at some point in the near future to fruiting pole beans and tomato vines, or perhaps a body of published work.
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That million word, 10,000 hour goal is within reach!

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