Paul Dorset points out that the common rule of thumb is that it takes 10,000 hours of doing something to become an expert. Then he applies it to writing.
10,000 is a lot of hours. It’s about 5 years of working an 8 hour, 5 day week with a few vacations thrown in. Or if you write at, let’s say 1,000 words an hour, it’s 10,000,000 words of writing. That’s a lot! Personally I think a better target would be about 2,000,000 words because if you wrote that many you would also have spent several times that editing and re-editing your work. I guess I’ve written close to a million words over my writing lifetime, but I’m not absolutely certain (I can definitely account for about 800,000). Either way, it’s a lot of words.
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1 comments
2,000,000 words? Wow… still a lot! But probably right on target for the Great American Novel (TM) or some similar work, right?