11/02/2010
One Meeleyun Words
That's meant to be Doctor Evil, by the way...no, what I mean is I just realised that by the time I finish the book I've just started - The Thousand Emperors - I'll have passed the one million word mark; meaning I'll have written - at my best guesstimate - at least one million words of fiction since I started writing (including both published and unpublished words, to be precise). The bulk of that is in my published novels, mind you, and assumes I'd written maybe fifty or sixty thousand words of (mostly unpublished) prose before I first tried my hand at writing a novel. That feels like it might be something worth celebrating.
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This goes back a while, I know, but isn't the prevalent orthodoxy that one must write a couple of hundred thousand words to - and I quote - 'get the shit out of one's system' before one can think about being a purveyor of fine scribbles? If so, to launch from only 60,000 words is therefore pretty impressive. Now, were I to tally a word count of my own fictions (mostly unpublished), I think I'd only be on about 600 (I do tend to re-write quite a lot, you see - this blog post has taken me about seven hours, for example.) That said, I did write the first 20,000 words of a re-imagining of the bible back when I was at University, but I had to give that up when I realised I'd never match the lusty fun of the original (despite, of course, the original's lack of space-ships and explosions.)
One of these days I'm going to write a really hefty, meaningful tome; in the meantime, I think I'll concentrate on a couple of shorter books, which I'll fill with words like loquacious, circumlocution, coprolalia and other tropical fruits.
All the best,
Chiwetel
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