Ten Thousand Words

When I heard the popular assertion that it takes ten thousand words of practice to master a skill, really master it, I felt pretty cheered. Ten thousand words! That’s not so many; it’s maybe forty pages typewritten. My doctoral thesis was a hundred and eighty-something pages, not counting the appendices, and I wrote basically every word of that. Granted, many of the pages had diagrams or figures on them taking up a quarter or half of the page. And, yes, whole sections were essentially boilerplate with minimal literary or artistic merit. But still! Ten thousand words is a low enough bar that I don’t doubt that I hit it with my thesis, even allowing for all that.

And if you count all the words I’ve written which are archived here — 266 posts, not counting this one — then surely I’ve lapped 10,000 words a few times. There’s a vast repository of thankfully-lost campaign notes and bizarre fanfiction out there. From high school up until I went into high gear for grad-school finishing, I produced a fairly steady stream of written material. Heck, I probably hit ten thousand words back in middle school!

But do I rest on my laurels? Well, for the last few months yes, I have rested on my laurels. But should I? Doesn’t the world deserve the continuing creative output of me, a man who has written well in excess of ten thousand words, and must surely, therefore, be counted among the great amateurs of short essays and fiction? I say yes!

Even learning that in fact I’m completely off-base, and it’s ten thousand hours of output, not ten thousand years, and that ten thousand hours is a reasonable benchmark for ten years of practice: this is not enough to stymie me. Depress me, yes. Stymie, no. I suppose what I’m trying to say is I’m going to try to write a bit more. You’ve been warned.