word count

According to my ao3 settings, since I joined in 2013, I have posted a total of 1,529,923 words. Depending on the veracity of my sources, this is 500,000 words north of the combined word total of the Harry Potter series, 200,000 words south of the current word count of A Song of Ice and Fire series, 1,000,000 words more than the Twilight series, 15 times more words than Anne of Green Gables, and 30,000 times the word count of The Great Gatsby. Approximately.

Does that help? No, not at all?

2013 was 13 years ago. Averaged out, I’ve produced 115,000 words a year since then. This averages out to 9500 words a month, which averages out to 315 words a day. Approximately.

Does that help? Actually, it might.

Up to “might” at the end of the last sentence, this blog post is 127 words. A “standard” paragraph is approximately 100-200 words long. So, three-ish paragraphs a day, and you could write a full novel and then some in a year.

[Quick disclaimer, I am leaving myself 90-100k of wiggle room for novel two, which was written last year, and is currently in the editing stages but without an ending. It was just easier to use the ao3 total, but even then, adding 100k onto my ao3 total only brings the daily average word count up to (approximately) 337. Minimal difference.]

I was asked at one point to talk about being a “prolific” writer. I understand why it looks that way. Broken all the way down to a daily total of 315 words, though? A little less impressive, but I would hope helpful to anyone who feels like they struggle to get words down on the page. And keep in mind, an average is an average. There are days I write no words at all. There are days I bang out 3000 in no time flat, but let me tell you right now, those are the far end of the spectrum. Most days are like pulling teeth. Most days are a sentence or a few paragraphs and then, somehow, I just cannot continue for one more second. It’s not like I’m making up new words as I write, but still, I am making up the words as I write them. I am creating something from nothing, and that’s hard. It’s hard to create for an extended period of time. I can’t even imagine being pregnant. Nine months of creating without a break. Shudder to think.

Not even to mention that numbers are numbers, but admin is admin. Writing is full of admin; planning, plotting, scheduling, organizing, time management, grammar, syntax, flow, revisions, characterization, themes, and on… and on… and on… I don’t know how much time it takes to write 1.5 million words as the crow flies, but I can certainly tell you that’s not an accurate reflection of how much time it took to craft those 1.5 million words. Pretentious? Sure. But also true. Philosophically and artistically, you could certainly argue the amount of supposed “craft” in many of my works. Doesn’t change how long I spent thinking about/writing/editing/scoping/everything-ing the thing.

If quantity is all you’re going for, well, nothing is stopping you from typing “curtains” 60,000 times over until you have a novel-length document full of curtains. I don’t want to lull you into a false sense of security that if you write 315 words a day for a year, you will automatically have a novel at the end of it. Actually, you’re just going to have a lot more work waiting for you. And then some more. And then some more. And then, if you want to sell it, well, the work actually hasn’t even begun yet, because is it really “work” when you’re not getting paid for it? Up to that point, you were doing a hobby. Now, you’re doing work. And it might not have even been any good.

You could write a story forever, is the thing. You could describe stuff endlessly. You could spin the characters out on more storylines endlessly. You could send them into an alternate universe. You could kill them. You could make them kiss. You could make them criminals, or heroes, or normies, or bakers, or witches, or losers, and then back again. You can just keep telling the story. Quantity is not actually an issue. There is always something to write about. There’s always something you can add to the story (or take away, but that’s for another post).

Writing a story is different than writing prolifically. Writing a story implies you’ve crafted a narrative through a series of escalating plot developments from beginning to end. Writing prolifically means the story should’ve ended 200,000 words ago. This is going to sound rude, because it is, but if you come from the world of fanfiction (like I did, it’s a self-own), then the line between writing a story and writing prolifically is going to be blurry.

In fandom world, you just want to see the guys (because it is almost always guys) kiss. You want them to be happy and hold hands and have sex and many people, people who, to me, are deeply alien, want them to have kids and be a big happy nuclear family, too. Readers want no complexity, they want no difficulties or challenges or obstacles that can’t be resolved with a good speech or, in the more progressive and deeply annoying fics, therapy and medication. They want uncomplicated easy-to-digest romance narratives. Which is basically just regular degular romance, a wildly popular genre across the female demographic, so really, fandom, beyond being almost exclusively m/m, is not really that different than a lot of the normie boring romance that makes it onto booktok.

And actually, I’ve kind of owned myself here, because a lot of those narratives could barely be called such, and yet, there they are, on tables in Indigo and book-shaped and with pages and everything. It’s probably important to remember that a lot (not all, but a lot) of widely read books are… bad. But a good reminder that quantity (of words, of salaries, of royalties…) is not the be all end all.

I think sometimes when people comment on the “amount” I’ve written, they aren’t necessarily commenting on the literal word count. Maybe they think they are. But I suspect when you really drill down on that question, especially if you’re a writer yourself, and you’re interested in and/or enjoy my work, what you’re really asking is how do I keep writing stories. In my head, anyway, that’s the true rub. Because the answer to the mercenary, numbers-only question of “how do you write so much” is simply that I write until the story is done. And as I’ve gotten older and better at writing, my work has grown more complex and layered and interesting, but not always longer. Longer doesn’t mean better, or anything at all, really, save the fact I badly need an editor. You just write until it’s done. Ten pages. Twenty. Five-hundred. My last Wangxian fic in MDZS fandom was 20,000 words long. Hardly a tome. But I hit 20k, and it was done. The story was over, so it was done.

Don’t Worry About It? Well, that was north of 100k. I wrote until it was done. I wrote until the story was over. Same approach as my final Wangxian fic, yet very different word count. Wren’s journey, from a narrative standpoint, reached its conclusion at 110k. I just received a deeply kind comment on it literally today that mentioned how great it would be to have a few one-offs where Wren and Ashley just got to have some romantic fun, and I agree! That would be awesome. At the same time, it’s not necessary. Not from a narrative standpoint. In fact, from a narrative standpoint, it would be useless.

—Which is fine, by the way. I cut my teeth on useless fanfiction. It’s a huge part of how I grew as a writer. Hell, every third literary fiction novel, basically nothing happens. I think—with great fondness—of Come This Here July as a victim of the classic Literary Fiction crime; dense as lead, and not a thing happens. Don’t Worry About It comes close. Novel two? Similar. Even these blog posts. It’s just kind of my thing, apparently. Very human condition of me. Sometimes to the point where I desperately want to plot out a genre caper with rigidly defined plot points full of obvious twists and turns and character archetypes, just to get some semblance of structure under my feet instead of the existential cacophonic muck my writing so often wades through.

Sometimes, I think people just aren’t prepared for the fact that writing is difficult. I talked about this in my previous blog post, but truly, sometimes, it’s just hard, and it’s easy to mistake persistent for prolific. There’s no secret to it, no matter what anyone says. To write, whether it’s a little or a lot, you just have to sit down and do it. Or stand, I guess, if you’re fancy. Think of it like exercise, maybe. A necessary evil, that, once complete, you will never regret having done.

Unlike a number of other writing elements I’ve spoken about on this blog, word count is not really a tool. It’s just a neutral measurement. It doesn’t mean anything other than practice, assuming you’ve hit that number in good faith and didn’t “curtains” your way to the top. I’m now 1.5 million words more experienced than I was thirteen years ago. I certainly wasn’t always thinking of it as learning or practice or experimenting or finding my style, but that’s exactly what I was doing all that time, and I’m better off for it, and just plain better for it.

Forget prolific. Focus on practice. The words count all the same.