One Meeelion . . . Words!

That’s right folks. I’ve set a goal for the year 2010 to write no less than 1,000,000 words.

The reason for this announcment? Accountability.

As many of you know, my wife and I have been participating in National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org) and each year we’ve announced to everyone we know that we’re doing it. This is because we need the social pressure to make sure we meet our goal of writing a 50,000 word work of fiction in a single calendar month.

This situation is no different.

You should know that not every one of those 1,000,000 words will be fiction. I also write non-fiction for my living and those words will be counted as well.

This breaks down to about 4,000 words a day, about five days a week for the whole year. At my usual pace, this works out to at least two hours of sustained drafting each day, or less when you factor in my daily work. This is very do-able for me!

I came to this resolution when I heard an unwritten rule that professional writers have to write at least 1,000,000 words before they can be truly successful. Of course there are exceptions, but I totally see the logic. It’s sort of the writer’s equivalent of the 10,000 hour-rule presented in the book Outliers.

According to some, this work is necessary to learn just how bad a writer you are, and gives you the time to work out all your demons and issues. After that, the bad writing is out of the way and you can move on to the good stuff!

I’m excited to see the results.

To help ensure success I’m committing to incremental goals that will help me get to 1,000,000. I plan on entering the L. Ron Hubbard Writers and Illustrators of the Future contest (www.writersofthefuture.com) every quarter. I plan on drafting 10 full-length novels in the course of next year. I’ll write for my business blog faithfully every single week.

I’m sure as I get closer and as I move through the year I’ll come up with some other incremental goals, but I think those should make for a good start.

I thank all of your for your interest, support, and (should I decide to chicken out) merciless ridicule.

To 1,000,000 words! Here I go!

-Tom