Photo credit: Marty O’Neill on Unsplash

Sixty-four days down. Nearly two-thirds of the way to my present goal.

Then what?

(I really need to learn how to recognize an accomplishment without immediately looking beyond it, but that’s for another post.)

What’s truly odd is the extent to which I’m finding myself thrown by Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer, which started on Saturday. Somehow, I’d lost track of the days enough that when I received Jami’s first letter on June 1 which encouraged me to write 1,000 words, my first thought was, “Yeah, whatever.” One thousand words a day for fourteen days feels like practically nothing this year, and yet last year, it was a huge deal. The year before—the year my father died during #1000wordsofsummer—I stayed faithful, missing two days and making them up at the end. And yet this year, a part of me feels like, “Fourteen days. So what?”

It’s astonishing, how fast perspective shifts.

The truth is that there have been so many days of my life when I couldn’t have written a dozen words, much less a thousand. Even now, after more than two months of writing at least a thousand words every single day, “a thousand words” sounds enormous, like a mountain no mere amateur could hope to climb: stand back, let the professionals handle this. The only reason my daily practice works now is because I’ve built it day by day, keeping my mind in the story, unwilling to let go no matter what.

Is that what writing a book requires? Or mastering a musical instrument, or earning a degree, or running a marathon? Or anything else that can’t be done in a single shot, that requires practice day after day after day, making infinitesimal progress, without regard for whether you actually feel like doing it—is this what’s necessary? Is this how we move from I wish to I did?

I think so.

I read somewhere that we don’t start to write well until we’ve written a million words. Have I written a million words? Who knows? Probably. According to a google search, it takes 416.7 hours to write a million words (assuming you’re typing 40 words per minute). It’s anybody’s guess how they came up with that number, but I can absolutely say that I passed that figure a long, long time ago. But what does that mean about my competency? Am I a competent writer? Does merely putting down words on a page—handwritten, typed, entered into a computer—automatically make one competent? Um, no. I say this with complete confidence: it is possible for a person to write a million words and still have most of those words be complete dreck.

Because the number of words, while a useful practice, doesn’t tell the whole story, especially when those words comprise a first draft. Generally speaking, first drafts are Not Wonderful. Trust me on this. I suppose there are rare exceptions, but for the most part, first drafts suck. They’re the place where we’re more into discovering the story than figuring out how to tell it—what words, what images, what themes and tropes and rhythms. I’m certain there are exceptions—after all, there are exceptions to everything—but I’m willing to bet that for most of us, our first drafts are not something we’d be willing to show anyone whose opinion we respect.

That said, the number of words does mean something. It means we’re making progress. It means we’re buckling down, we’re showing up, we’re doing the work. If we were painting a mural, it would mean the color is moving across the wall or ceiling, working inch by inch until the entire surface is alive with color. If we were composers, the notes would be tumbling through time, frantic clusters of sixteenth notes or long, languid tied notes stretching for measures. If we were runners, each step would move us closer to the finish line.

So whether you just started #1000wordsofsummer on Saturday or whether you’re like me and you’ve been doing your own version for months, I encourage you to take that first step today. Write the sentence, paint the flower, compose the phrase, run the block. Whatever it takes to get you started, to move from I wish to I did.