Builder's Ink Publishing

There’s an idea in the writing world that a writer’s first one million words are just practice—that a writer has to write a million words before they can consider themselves proficient at writing. That number might be an exaggeration, but the underlying sentiment is true: it takes a lot of practice to get good at writing, as it does for anything else. The good news is that it’s easier to reach that million-word milestone than you may realize. You might’ve even passed it without knowing.

Months ago, I attended a writing workshop at my local library. As we introduced ourselves, one question we were asked to answer was “How long have you been writing?” I was unsure how to answer that. At what point did I ‘start’ writing? Was it several months before the workshop, when I wrote the first paragraphs of what I thought was going to become a novel? Was it back in high school, when I wrote a poem about a girl I liked? Was it back in elementary school, when I wrote my first book report? I’ve been writing in some capacity since I was a kid, before I knew what being a writer meant or had any aspirations of becoming one. Chances are, so have you.

Think of every paper you’ve ever written in school, every text message you’ve ever sent to a friend, every email you’ve ever sent to a colleague, and so on—it all counts as writing practice. Words don’t have to be written specifically for creative projects (books, plays, stories, and the like) to count as practice. Even the mundane, everyday writing can help you sharpen your skills. Emails and texts are exercises in communicating with relatively few words. Conciseness is a good skill to have, regardless of what you’re writing—why use ten words when you only need three? School essays are exercises in writing well-structured arguments and narratives. Good structure is essential to good writing—it enables your work to build on itself and makes it easier to follow. Any practice you get in these areas, no matter how small and unexciting it may be, will build your writing skills.

It may take you countless emails, letters, reports, and unfinished drafts for you to become a skilled writer, but the little bits of practice you get every day without thinking about it bring you closer to it. Keep writing.