Novel Writing Tips: Write a Million Bad Words
by Mary Kole | Former literary agent, now a freelance editor, writing teacher, and IP/story developer for major publishers and creators.
If you want the hottest of our novel writing tips, the best advice for beginning writers that we’ve found is to … simply get writing. Then write some more, and then some more. Until you write a million bad words.
Successful authors (and Malcolm Gladwell, who developed the mastery paradigm) all agree that you have to write and write and write (for approximately one million bad words or 10,000 hours) before you can start producing something publishable. Maybe this isn’t one of the novel writing tips you expected, but the one you probably need.
Why Writing a Million Bad Words Is One of the Best Novel Writing Tips
It’s true: you have to write a ton of rubbish before you can learn to recognize the difference between good and bad. Now, don’t expect your one-millionth word to be brilliant all of a sudden. It doesn’t exactly work like that, either. It takes time to reach fluency or mastery or skill in anything. And once you get there—after you reach a million words—your writing journey has only just begun.
Novel writing tips that focus on theory or query letters (sorry to all those query letter lovers out there, but the manuscript itself is much more important) are not nearly as helpful.
If it were easy to write a great novel, everyone would be doing it. Publishing success has to be earned. There are no shortcuts and no novel writing tips that can offer you an escape from the hard work or sitting down in your writing chair and actually writing.
Novel Writing Tips: Get Ready to Create
Ally Carter compares the process of writing fiction to clearing out a garden hose after a long winter. If you've ever had an old hose that's been sitting in your backyard, then you know it will be full of dirt and gunk when you turn on the water. You have to flush it all out before clean, fresh water can run through.
This is the same with writing. You have to churn out all the bad story ideas, flat characters, physical cliches, bad jokes, and overblown hyperbole before you can get to the good stuff. The best advice out of all the novel writing tips out there online? Write every day without ego and keep going until you've gone through that first million bad words. Only then can you start writing words that really matter. The world can’t wait to read what you come up with for words one-million-plus.
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