What Do 1,000 Words Look Like Exactly?
“Write a thousand words a day and in three years you will be a writer.”
“You don’t need it to be summer, and you don’t need to be in a cottage in the woods. You can be anywhere and write those words. You just have to want it.”
Let’s explore what 1,000 words looks like below this sentence (Oh, and I added some swear words for flavor, but not at anyone in particular, just an FYI, so it starts….now!):
There must be something special about the thousand word threshold. Ray Bradbury mentioned it, Stephen King aims for it now (he used to write at least 2,000 words a day) and recommends it for new writers, and Jami Attenberg in 1,000 Words of Summer used that goal, as she saw it as a guideline that was “a good day’s work, a meetable goal, a step toward finishing a project, a simple metric for creative output.” It is also about 4 pages double-spaced.
Some other things I’ve noticed about it is that it’s a nice round number. If you obsess over word count, perhaps you can reach that exact number, but from my own personal goal and measuring my progress each day, I never hit 1,000 words exactly. Somedays when I’m really cooking, the words are flowing, my imagination is unraveling like a long carpet where everything spills out, I get 1,020 or 1,203 words. Other days, when I have to let things cook a bit longer, when some ideas aren’t fully realized and not quite ready for harvesting, I get 603 or 885 words. And on the rare day like the day before this post, where I felt dizzy and just off the track, I wrote 117 words.
Still, it’s a great goal. And on those days where I only had 885 words, I felt proud of each of those. And these aren’t exactly refined. I pants for most of it, but I feel like I’m on the right path. And I also tell myself, “That’s 885 words I didn’t have before.” Pushing ourselves to get there, to that perfect round number, is a great goal, but no one is perfect. I think that’s a good reminder when I fall just short or go just over.
I’ll admit something: I just checked the word count thinking I had to be close, but at the end of the paragraph above, I was only at 296 words. One good tip I have is to only check word counts when you are done so you can focus on the writing. In a way, writing should be like being at a casino. There shouldn’t be any clocks, you shouldn’t sell yourself short, but you should only withdraw what you want to lose from the ATM (Unless you’re stupid rich or just…not that forward thinking. I’ve heard stories of people losing over $500, and either they are well to do with a long paying job or a side hustle with shit coin rug pulls tied to the price of eggs or lost in a sunk-cost fallacy.) I think that’s where 1,000 words come in. Sometimes you get out with more, sometimes you get out with less, or other times, you blow it all and need a self-care day. And that’s all okay! We learn.
1,000 words is a commitment that while we can’t be perfect, that the writing isn’t perfect from the word go, we can still strive toward it without destroying ourselves. It’s currency that we spend on creating worlds with realized beings, writing our own stories whether true to our lives or how we see the world, and/or a combination of all of those things. 1,000 words is a playground where we can throw the sand where ever we want, shove it down the socks of passing strangers, dig to find a secret world underneath, or simply taking a dirt bath like a chicken, 1,000 words is a safe place to let it all out, to let that shit go, to pull out those emotions and stamp them into a document where we can fully realize them and see that they maybe are all yaps and barks with no teeth, or maybe there is something there that requires a professional to come in and muzzle and/or train.
We’re over the halfway point now (me…breaking my own rule and checking again.) The beautiful thing about writing a first draft is that it’s for you and you alone. We do write because we eventually want someone else to read it and either agree with us, see our point of view, become changed in some way, or at least be entertained and validate that we can unspool a wonderful yarn and that the carpet unraveled took them places they didn’t feel could exist. That’s all good, but you get to go there first. You’re the first reader.
And even if it doesn’t get published right away or published at all or ends up sitting on your computer’s drive or as a paper copy you get to look at from time to time and fiddle with, it’s worth the journey. It is worth sharing to at least yourself what was once dormant in your imagination with ties to yourself and your life is now down on paper. It’s ready to be refined, redefined for others, and might help them redefine or add to their definitions of what is possible within a character, narrative, plot, etc.
Those 1,000 words can’t be replicated by anyone else. Not by Stephen King, James Patterson, or A.I., but exist because you had the courage, desire, power, need, or combination of those things to put them down, to lay them out for yourself to see in hopes others will also see them.
Imagine how much deeper the world would be, how much more understanding we would have, and how much more interesting and entertaining life would be if more people shared their stories. We all have something to share with the world that can change it forever. (Imagine if we were happy with how raw meat tasted in a cave over a fire. Some people love that rustic and simple taste, but garlic and onions were introduced, now we have a more refined pallet and eat for more than survival. Reading should be the same. Sure, we need instructions on how to work a new deep fryer, but we also want to read about fantastical worlds, horror and hell-scapes, and other people’s struggles/accomplishments.)
That’s 1,000 words. Do I have more to say? Always. But that’s the thing: I am done with what I have to say for now. I’ll reset and do it all over again. Until next time, enjoy the process!
