“The first million words are practice.”
This quote is most often attributed to Stephen King, as it appears in his half-memoir, half-craft book, On Writing. A quick google search will net you a whole list of famous authors who’ve either come up with it independently or borrowed it from one another. I quite frankly can’t be bothered to figure out who said it first. The point is, it exists. It can be somewhat contentious. And I stand behind the idea of it, even if the number itself may vary.
Let’s get into it.
If This Quote Upsets You, Hi
I’ll start with the critiques. When people come for this statement, they usually fall into one of a few categories. The biggest is people who haven’t yet hit the benchmark but believe they’re highly skilled already, so they take issue with the implication that they’re still in some kind of “practice” stage. Next up is newer or slower writers who also haven’t hit a million and feel discouraged by the unattainability of the number.
Less common (but still present) are 1M+ authors who look back and feel nothing changed for them around that particular milestone. And the last, of course, are pedants who will “Well, actually—” for hours on Reddit about how the variability of the number for different people renders the entire statement obsolete. It’s the internet. It is what it is.
Many of these critics make fair points. I’ll get to them later. To start, however, I’m going to address the sticky question of writing goals. Or, put differently:
So the first million words are practice. So what?
Why Do You Write?
Our world is full of amateur artists doing art for fun. Regular people with non-art jobs (or even different-art ones) do karaoke, doodle in their notebook margins, make up stories for young relatives, run D&D campaigns, and so much more. They do this all the time. Is all of that “practice”? Well, yes. Technically, everything is practice, no matter your skill level. Most of the time, though, the answer doesn’t matter either way.
Why are practice and enjoyment perceived to be at odds with one another? Or practice and purpose? Practice and skill? None of these things are mutually incompatible. You can be a good writer long before hitting one million words. You can also go your whole life without ever racking up that wordcount and still feel perfectly fulfilled. It all depends on your writing goals. I would argue the pushback against this rule of thumb is, by and large, a context error: taking a pithy piece of writing advice from one context and applying it more broadly than originally intended.
You see, one important thing about that quote is that all the people it gets attributed to are professionals. They’re not writing in their spare time. It’s their main gig. And when we talk about practice milestones among people who write (or want to write) professionally, that opens up a very different conversation.
Big League, Little League
There are gradients of skill even within the scope of what can be considered “professional” writing. If you serialize online and funnel people to an active Patreon for bonus content, your readers’ quality expectations will likely be lower than in self-publishing, which will in turn be lower than indie publishing with a small press. All three will bow before traditional publishing with a big publishing house.
In general, tradpub is “the big leagues” for writing, with extremely competitive entry requirements and stiff demands for most authors even once they’re in. Querying is a brutal, demoralizing crawl. Going on sub does not guarantee your book will be picked up even after all the work to get an agent. Veterans of this industry may have dozens or even hundreds of books under their belts. This is certainly the case for Stephen King.
So. What does one million words mean in this context?
So You Want To Be A Pro
To answer this question, I’m going to reframe the million-word milestone in the language of a different art form.
Say you want to be a professional portrait artist.
Your dream is to set up a cute studio in the city somewhere, or maybe a reclusive 18th-century manor in the woods. You fantasize about taking commissions for anniversaries or birthday parties, surprising friends with stunning gifts, maybe even setting up shop on a street corner and doing $10 quick-sketch portraits for people passing by. You want the work you turn out to actually look like the person.
Or say you want to be a professional comic artist, picked up by a big studio, or posting on the internet for pay. You dream of being recognized as one of those up-and-coming stars; of readers referring one another to your work, saying it’s so good! You’re aware of all the different skills that go into this art form—linework, shading, scene staging, storytelling, facial expressions, backgrounds, the capture of movement, and so many more. You can’t wait to bring them all together.
Or what if you were a landscape painter? You aspire to become one of those artists who has their own coffee-table books, laden with imagery so breathtaking, it looks almost photographic. It evokes emotion. It does things with color and texture that you can only dream of replicating. Those artists speak of laboring over giant canvases, sometimes making progress, sometimes erasing two weeks of work with the stroke of a hand because it didn’t turn out to their satisfaction.
Sound Hard Enough Yet?
Here’s another.
Say you want to be a professional musician. A solo virtuoso, or a member of a prestigious orchestra. Maybe a touring band. You might be a singer or an instrumentalist. Say you just picked up the violin or oud or saxophone or bansuri for the very first time. Maybe you played piano or recorder as a child; you can read music notation. You’re not a total rookie.
Would you audition for a pro orchestra with your very first song?
Would you pitch you and your friends’ first garage band recording to a record company?
Would you submit your first painting to a local gallery?
Would you query a comic studio with your first-ever doodles in comic form?
Or would you consider it fair to say a brand-new musician’s first thousand songs, a comic artist’s first thousand panels, and a portrait artist’s first thousand faces are practice?
A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Words
Somehow, we’re better conditioned to recognize experience progression in other art forms than in writing. Maybe it’s because writing is inherently more abstract than visual art or music, making skill differences harder to spot with an inexperienced eye. Maybe it’s because our world is full of stories of breakout debut novelists, but very few of musical prodigies who don’t dedicate all their waking hours to practice. Or maybe it’s because we write all the time. They are not storytelling words, maybe, but they are words all the same. That counts… right?
Well. We speak all the time, too. Does that make everyone a professional voice actor? News broadcaster? Sports commentator? Singer?
Many words can count as “written” words. Rewrites count. Revisions count. Fanfiction, bonus content, unfinished and abandoned drafts—you name it! The important part isn’t whether the book was finished or what the genre was. It’s whether you put in the elbow grease on the thing you’re trying to improve on… which is to say, storytelling.
The Skills Inventory
Written storytelling is a conversation between an author and an audience. It is the ability to put words on the page, yes, but also to capture imagery, emotion, action, and interiority, all in a way that furthers the story. It is structure and pacing and a rock-solid handle on cause and effect. It is character development, motivation, consistency, relatability, and authenticity. It’s grammar and spelling. Scene choice, scene transition, tension, framing, voice, atmosphere, psychic distance, balanced prose, and POV. It’s character selection. Conflict scaling. The tight binding of internal and external plot arcs. To name just a few!
And then, because none of this is just about the author, storytelling also requires understanding and working with the minds of the audience. It is doing all of the above in a way that deliberately guides and shapes a reader’s mental and emotional experience. It is knowing exactly how to hook new readers with your very first line, paragraph, page, and chapter. How to manage information to avoid overloading them along the way. It is being able to understand why something did or didn’t land, how to fix the slumps, and how to replicate the successes. Also how to cultivate and maintain reader trust to actually keep them invested in the story.
Beyond Actually Writing
On an even more meta level, storytelling in the professional spheres should require some grasp of theme, allegory, appropriation, and representation. It asks for an awareness of what your book is saying-without-saying-out-loud, the impact that might have on different audiences, and what your work contributes to the social conversation. Because it will contribute something, whether you want it to or not.
AND THEN, because none of this matters if you don’t Actually Do The Thing, pro-level writing is also being able to finish books, finish series (if you write them), and demonstrate the staying power of a professional. The thing about doing something as a job is that you can’t just do it when you feel like it. You have to do it even when it sucks. You have to understand the market and make business decisions, not just follow the shiniest idea at any given time. That’s a whole skill on its own.
Writing Is Hard
My point is, there’s something weird about writing when it comes to this particular area. We inherently recognize the value of practice in other art forms like music or visual art, and laud people who’ve poured the hours and days and years of blood, sweat, and tears into perfecting these crafts. Yet somehow, we believe writing alone can be mastered from the moment a beginner picks up a pen or sits down at a keyboard.
There is no way to master an art form without practice. Craft study can boost your progress. It can give you more tools to work with. It can teach you the vocabulary to spot what’s wrong or lacking in your artistry. But at the end of the day, music theory and playing music are two different skills. So are color theory and painting. So are writing craft and writing. And obsessing over a single song or painting or story for days or months or years on end does not expand your skill horizon the way practicing new pieces of the same or different kinds would.
Throwing Books In The Bin
I suspect there are a few reasons why the thought of so many words being practice hurts for so many newer writers. One is that writing a book is an absolutely massive accomplishment. It’s something most of the world never does. It’s a bucket-list item for many people. And it’s hard. It can take years—even decades. After all that, the thought of sticking that book in a drawer and then doing the same thing five, ten, twelve more times is understandably discouraging.
Writing is also quite a tangible art form. In music, practice sessions are immaterial and leave no physical trace behind. Other art forms have paper trails: sketchbooks filled, canvases discarded, old photos or videos or attempts stashed away on a dusty hard drive. These tend to come in bits and pieces. When you finish a book, though, you have a whole book on your hands. It’s big. It’s substantial. It’s a lot of work in a single package. This makes it feel that much more precious than, say, a hundred sketches or bansuri practice sessions, even if the skill progression in all of the above is probably about the same.
Straight To The Heart
Then there’s the fact that writing is often deeply personal in a way few other art forms compare to. People’s first books are often stories they’ve nursed for decades. Their characters may be their best imaginary friends. Such books might have seen their authors through immensely tough times or stages of life, or they may delve into themes that are of deep personal value to their creators. That first book may be the one they most want the world to see. In every case, writing such a book is an act of pouring out one’s soul, and the thought of that being practice is, once again, discouraging.
And then there are those breakout stars. People in their teens or twenties who get swept up by a publishing house, and whose first books hit the New York Times Bestseller list for weeks or months on end. If they can do it, why can’t anyone? If [insert famous author here] can make a fortune with writing that frankly isn’t all that good, why can’t we? Why is the world of writing so unfair?
First, About Those Professionals
“I don’t understand why they’re so popular. Their writing sucks.”
Maybe it does. Maybe you just don’t like it. Maybe you can see why people get invested in it, but jealousy gets in the way, so you need a reason to measure yourself up to that popular author. But all of that aside, popularity speaks (in part) to an author knowing their audience. Maybe their writing doesn’t stack up to others on a craft level, but they hit a particular combination of tropes or character types or worldbuilding that contributes to their sales.
There is always, of course, the question of privilege, and that should never be discounted. I could speak for hours on that topic, but that would thoroughly derail this blog post, so I’ll leave it for another time. Even with privilege in the mix, though, the things popular authors do well shouldn’t be discounted either. It’s a complex industry. Pure craft quality doesn’t equal success. And things like nailing a trope, knowing an audience, and replicating success across books are among the skills built up through—you guessed it—practice.
“They did it with their first book. Why can’t I?”
There’s a funny little fact that few people seem to recognize about debut authors: a debut is very, very rarely someone’s actual first book. It’s just their first public one, guys. We have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of words of writing doodles, discarded half-books, trunked first drafts, and/or secret fanfiction they have under their belts. Fanfiction is very much real writing, and builds important skills. It’s also a very common place for writers to get their start. But the pervasive stigma around it means you’ll likely never know a debut author’s handle on AO3.
When someone really does knock it out of the park with their first-ever book, meanwhile, there are often other factors involved. A good editor stands head and shoulders above everything else in that category.
Broader Context
Creative, narrative writing also has some transferable skills, however. Journalists and tabletop gamemasters, for example, often have a head start on storytelling intuition. Actors and psychologists tend to get into the minds of their characters really well. Educators, historians, and subject-matter communicators have a leg up on worldbuilding and information management. Prolific readers also have an edge. They’re more likely to have an instinctive sense of storytelling beats than someone whose hobbies are mostly unrelated to storytelling.
Community and mentorship are also factors in all this. Authors who are deeply embedded in a writing community tend to improve a lot faster. They have the ability to share tips and talk craft with a range of other authors, especially those more experienced than them. That can drive a lot of variation in how fast writers mature in the early to intermediate stages.
The last thing to note about breakout debut authors, though, is that they are exceedingly rare. They seem overrepresented because they tend to make a big splash on launch. But on the whole, maybe 1% of people who write ever get published, and maybe 1% of published authors make a living off it as a full-time job. The bulk of those are career authors with the aforementioned dozens of books under their belts. Stephen King has 67 books and over 200 short stories at the time of this blog post—and those are just the ones he’s actually published. I’ll let you do the math.
Make Your Shitty Pots
There’s a post that floats around the internet that I absolutely love. If you haven’t seen it before, here it is:
I love how perfectly this analogy captures the unparalleled benefits of hands-on practice, especially compared to perfectionism or craft study. There’s a reason Stephen King references a million words, not ten thousand hours of poring over blog posts and online courses learning what a good book looks like. But I also love the shitty-pots analogy for another reason: it validates all practice, no matter the quality of the work at hand.
No words you write are wasted words. Every step above zero is a step along your writing journey. If you’re brand, brand new to writing, you’re going to be a rookie—there’s no two ways about that. There’s only so much that nitpicking and editorial support can do for a book that just isn’t there on a structural level. But if you’ve been going for a while and have a couple hundred thousand under your belt, you’re already well on your way into the intermediate levels.
On A Journey
One million words isn’t an off/on switch. Nor it is the mark of expertise. Instead, think of it as a very rough benchmark for the writing equivalent of hand-eye coordination. It’s like being able to walk, jump, run, spin, and balance effortlessly before you launch into competitive gymnastics. It’s like being able to faithfully capture a mental image with a drawing, or knowing your instrument well enough to play by muscle memory. It’s the point where many authors find that putting something into words has become instinctive, allowing them to expand their horizons to improve other aspects of storytelling.
All this means one million words is far, far from the end of a professional author’s journey. In fact, much like the quote at the start of this post suggests, it’s just the beginning. If you’re an intermediate writer who’s headed for the milestone and doesn’t feel like you have everything figured out, that’s completely normal. It means you’ve hit a point where you now know what you don’t know instead of floating along, comfortably ensconced in blissful ignorance.
So to everyone on this journey… if you’re writing, you’re moving forward. You’ve got this! You’ll get there. You’re doing great.
About the Author
A.B. Channing is a queer speculative fiction writer and blogger who loves analyzing the writing industry and dislikes speaking about himself in third person. Most of his work is Dark Fantasy or Horror, but he frequently dabbles in Sci-Fi, Paranormal, and Romance. When not at his keyboard, he can most often be found up to his elbows in a pond.
Follow This Blog
Want to be notified of more posts like this? Enter your email below to subscribe to this blog. You won’t be added to A.B. Channing’s regular newsletter.