Write a Million Words

C.L. Stone:

Write a million words. Your first million is practice.

Hugh Howey‘s response:

This is so difficult to appreciate and even harder to do. Writing a novel is such a brutal undertaking, something we dream about but put off for years and years, that when we finally succeed, to say that this was nothing more than “practice” is heart-rending.

After three years and four drafts, I have now written 986,000 words in these two novels. Ah, and I see that I’ve got a file called unused_chapters.txt with another 43,901 words. Throw in one or two short stories, and I’m just past the 1.1 x 10⁶ mark.

Now I’m ready to write for real.

Onward!

(and now, an image of a man standing next to one million pennies.)