How Many Words Must A Man Write Down
I’m a writer. I write a lot. It sort of comes with the territory. But occasionally I wonder, having been doing this for some time now, just how much I’ve got to show for it. And I don’t mean published works, long or short, self or trad – I mean raw mass, the volume of my ramblings over the years.
Simply put, I want to know what the big number is. How many words have I written?
There is a simple answer, because for a little over 8 years – since the deaths of Monty Oum and Sir Terry Pratchett – I’ve written a minimum of 500 words a day. Every day. I have not stopped. Even yesterday, when I overslept by an hour and managed to get 500 words down in about 20 minutes before dashing off to work, which is definitely some sort of record.
8 years, 2920 days, 500 words a day: that works out at a minimum of 1,460,000 words. Not bad.
But a minimum is a minimum. So let’s do some maths (dangerous, I know) and pore through a lot of word-counts, and see if there’s a more precise total. Here, then, is a list of everything I could be bothered to count.
Enjoy the peek behind the curtain, too. Some of these titles you’ll be familiar with. Most, you won’t. Some of the latter you’ll hopefully see some day… most you definitely won’t.
Ok, so I didn’t write Shakespeare or my own graduation guide, but they had to go somewhere.Ad Luna: 88,000
The Blackbird and the Ghost: 62,000
Nightingale’s Sword: 98,000
Boiling Seas 3 (so far): 53,000
The Fire Within: 18,000
Before The Dawn (the original draft): 127,000
The Future King: 287,000
Negative Saints: 18,000
Salvage 7 (including the unfinished part 2): 118,000
The Scar: 67,000
The Seven Shards (including the unfinished part 2): 237,000
Smoke and Neon, Blood and Gold: 90,000
That Bit Of Warhammer: 40,000 Background That Got Out Of Hand: 39,000
The Short Stories I Counted Before I Got Bored: about 180,000
Which, altogether, comes in at 1,482,000. Huzzah: I have beaten the bare minimum!
But this is just the finished products. (Or the most recent versions, for the ones I haven’t finished editing yet. Which is most of them.) I’m not including a lot of short pieces – any of the Curtis Brown lockdown workouts, for instance. Or all the stuff I wrote for that videogame that never happened. Or these blog posts, which I’ve been doing regularly for quite a while now. Or countless half-finished or half-started bits and pieces, which clog up my hard drives no end, or the rewrites, the alternative versions, all the stuff consigned to the cutting-room floor. And if you add in 4 years of academic essays and dissertations, and another 3 years of documentary scripts and history book chapters from my old job…
It’s entirely possible that I’ve cracked 2 million words at this point. And that is a big number indeed. It’s almost 4 Lord of the Ringses. It’s almost as long as Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. Well, the first 5 books. Of 10. Not counting the novellas.
Obviously, most of these words are rubbish. Most of them will never see the light of day. Those that do will be re-read, re-written, edited and warped beyond recognition. (Seriously, you should see the original drafts of some of the titles above. Or maybe you shouldn’t.)
But even if just 5% of those words were worth reading, that’s still enough for a decent book. And it’s not like I’m intending to stop or anything. This is the first 8 years. Plenty more to go.
So who knows? In a few decades’ time, I should have written enough decent words to add up to a properly good series or two, and enough rubbish ones to build a space elevator.
