I shared an arti­cle ear­lier today on Twit­ter and Google Reader about the old adage that you have to write a mil­lion words of junk to get it out of your sys­tem before you can start writ­ing good stuff. I’ve heard this before, and while I agree that it’s true in broad strokes, I think it’s miss­ing a cru­cial obser­va­tion. In today’s mul­ti­me­dia world, those words don’t all have to be prose.

Sure, some things about the craft of writ­ing you’ll only learn by writ­ing in your cho­sen or at least pri­mary medium. But a lot of things about writ­ing fic­tion – char­ac­ter, dia­logue, plot – the fun­da­men­tals, in other words, are the same no mat­ter what medium you choose. A story, fun­da­men­tally, is a story.

I was think­ing about this while dri­ving home in a snow­storm last week, because some­how think­ing to myself about writ­ing was deemed less dis­tract­ing than lis­ten­ing to a pod­cast about writ­ing. And it occurred to me that when I orig­i­nally wrote Between Heaven and Hell, thir­teen years ago, I hadn’t actu­ally writ­ten very much prose fic­tion up to that point. In fact, I’d writ­ten absurdly lit­tle for some­one intend­ing to write a novel for publication.

In high school, I’d writ­ten a Bat­man fan­fic short story and co-​wrote a Thor fan­fic novella. I also plot­ted out the early, early ances­tors to the story that has become Ghost Ronin and that yes, I’m still work­ing on a quar­ter cen­tury later. Call that maybe 25,000 words total.

In the Air Force, I wrote an X-​Files fan­fic short story about Sasquatch (I’ll leave you to find that on the inter­webs), pid­dled around with Ghost Ronin some more and on a bet wrote a short story set in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles uni­verse in one week­end. (The bet was with my room­mate, who noticed that I never seemed to fin­ish a story and bet me I couldn’t do it while he could. His story ended up being two pages of kitchy ban­ter that didn’t go any­where.) Fig­ure maybe another 50,000 words tops, though there was already an encour­ag­ing sign, if I’d under­stood what it was at the time. I only sub­mit­ted the short story, “The Drop,” to one place, F&SF. Look­ing back on it there was no chance they’d accept it, being one of the largest SF mag­a­zines in the mid 90s and given how hope­lessly cliched and deriv­a­tive the story was. And yet, while I did get a form let­ter rejec­tion – and in my inex­pe­ri­ence took that as an insult – they did hand­write on it that I should take note of their new edi­to­r­ial address, which they had help­fully cir­cled. Now I’d real­ize that was a hint that while they hadn’t had much inter­est in that par­tic­u­lar story, there was some­thing in my writ­ing that they wanted to see more of. It took me a long time to fig­ure that out.

But that’s it. When I started writ­ing my first novel, with every inten­tion of get­ting it pub­lished, I’d had less than a full novel’s worth of prac­tice, and far, far less than a mil­lion words. What made me think I could pull it off? In a very real way, I didn’t pull it off. Between Heaven and Hell was not pub­lished in print, and got picked up by Peanut Press mostly because I hap­pened to be nos­ing around when they were look­ing for orig­i­nal con­tent. A few months later, after they signed deals with some of the major pub­lish­ers to release ebook edi­tions, and they wouldn’t have needed me. And in a real way, my writ­ing did need a lot more sea­son­ing. It wasn’t until after Between Heaven and Hell (80,000 words), Do Over! (17,000 words), my screen­play “In Shin­ing Armor” (20,000 words in another iter­a­tion of what is now Ghost Ronin), Home­world (60,000 words, my 2006 NaNoW­riMo project) and the unpub­lished first book of the Neme­sis War, Mis­taken Iden­tity (80,000 words) that my writ­ing really started to achieve what I now con­sider pro­fes­sional lev­els. But add all that together and I’m still only at 332,000 words, only a third of the way to a million.

But the catch is that while I have a third of a mil­lion words of expe­ri­ence in prose fic­tion, I’ve been sto­ry­telling for a LOT longer than that. I started early, telling sto­ries orally in ele­men­tary school, usu­ally ad lib fairy tales com­plete with morals. In sixth grade, I was intro­duced to the old school Red Box D&D Basic Set, and it wasn’t long before I became a DM and started run­ning games of my own. I think a lot of my sto­ry­telling fun­da­men­tals come from design­ing and run­ning role play­ing cam­paigns in D&D, then the TMNT/​Robotech/​Rifts fam­ily of Pal­la­dium games, then the Heroes sys­tem I still play today. If you think about it, a lot of the skills over­lap. I had to cre­ate set­tings, cre­ate char­ac­ters for the play­ers to inter­act with, design plots for them to fol­low and yet be flex­i­ble enough to cre­ate some­thing new on the fly if the char­ac­ters did some­thing unex­pected, which they usu­ally did. I was 11 when I was intro­duced to role play­ing games, and still play them (though now I rarely GM, as I have my own sto­ries to tell) 27 years later. Add that to being a vora­cious reader and oh, yeah, that third of a mil­lion words I’ve actu­ally writ­ten to learn the specifics of writ­ing prose, plus the count­less words of non­fic­tion I’ve writ­ten over the years on this blog and oth­ers, and I prob­a­bly have equiv­i­lent expe­ri­ence to some­one who has just cranked out a mil­lion words of fic­tion in isolation.

Only I think I had a lot more fun.