How to write one million publishable words this year
Yes, you can.
Welcome to this journey of fun and tears and blood and sweat but also glory! This is the year we write one million publishable words. Not that we need to publish a million words. But we can. And we should. Write them, at least.
One million words means 2,739.72 words a day. Call it 3,000 publishable words. Every day of the year. Can you do it?
Sure you can.
First draft of anything, Hemingway famously and rightly said, is pretty much always shit. Except when you write more than 3,000 words a day. Suddenly you find that the more you write, the better you write.
So write, already.
I know. Easier said than done. I want to change that. I want to make your writing easy. At least easier. So easy in fact that cranking out 5,000 words a day from which to generate 3,000 publishable ones becomes eminently doable.
First step: The morning pages
Julia Cameron turned the boring activity of journaling into a crucial writer development process. Her idea is that all artists should write three pages first thing every morning. That’s it. Three pages. Just your thoughts, stream-of-consciousness style. No thinking, just writing. By hand. Cursive writing. Without thinking or stopping or editing. And without reading the pages afterwards.
There’s a whole section of her indispensable book, The Artist’s Way, that’s on morning pages. If you’re serious about your writing, you can’t avoid that part. It’s the best way to improve your ratio of words written to publishable words by removing the shit words from your system.
I have been doing morning pages religiously, without missing a single day, since May 2019. That’s over six years now. I can’t begin to tell you how much my output has improved, both in quantity and quality.
I write articles, press releases, newspaper columns, books, speeches, novellas, newsletters, media lines, short stories, strategic plans, one-pagers, impact reports — every single day of the year I crank out valuable written content for which I get paid. I get paid enough to make a living. You can, too.
I do the morning pages as close to first thing in the morning as possible, though often I’ll go for my morning run first. When I have an early morning flight, I will often write the morning pages the night before. Very occasionally I only get to the morning pages past noon. But not usually. Usually I do them first thing, with my first coffee. That’s about a thousand words right there, give or take. These are not meant to be published but some of them are eminently worthy of it.
Cameron says you’re not to read your pages. I cheat a bit. I read them after nine months, and extract the gems they contain in a separate notebook. Then I compost the originals so nobody sees them ever again.
In a next post I want to go over the routine I’ve developed that’s mostly based on Cameron’s edicts but a little modified to suit my style. There are reasons for the modifications and I find that they work for me in the sense that they help me improve what I do. Maybe they’ll help you, too.
But in the meantime, if I can entice you to do anything to improve your art — regardless of what medium you favour — get a copy of Cameron’s book and start writing your morning pages.