Early in the process of creating and maintaining this blog, I made a decision to keep tabs on how much writing I actually did. I started keeping an Excel file, and every time a new post is added here I record four things: The number of the post, the date it was first published, the title of the post, and the number of words contained in the post. WordPress provides the word count, and I wouldn’t bother with doing this otherwise.
But knowing exactly how much has gone into this space is helpful, on some level. I’m written more than 500 posts in just over a year’s time, which means slightly more than one new post a day. I try to write and post something new here every day, but some days I don’t get my thoughts finished and have to get some sleep. But 500 posts don’t create themselves, and I’m sure that a large amount of sleep has been sacrificed to create whatever it is I have here. So be it. This is more fun for me than sleeping, anyway.
The word counts for these posts can vary from less than 100 words if I’m posting a picture or a link to something online, to over 1,000 when I’m rambling on about something that interests me. But 500 words seems to be the steady average of the things that I write. And as the posts keep piling up, so does the aggregate word count.
If somebody had ever told me that I’d write a quarter of a million words, and then put them on the internet, where people in all but a handful of the nations around the world would happen upon them some day, I would have thought that person needed some serious help. But that’s just what has happened. The internet is indeed an amazing thing.
As I reached the 100,000 word mark in this space, I began looking at word counts for well-known books and novels. I had passed George Orwell’s 1984 by that point, which I still consider as the most engaging and thought-provoking novel I’ve ever read.
As time went by, and I kept adding more verbiage to this space, I passed other works like Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (109,000 words), Thoreau’s Walden (114,000 words), and James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (145,000 words). But the standard, as far as contemporary books go, is J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.
By the time I had reached 200,000 words, earlier this year, I had surpassed the word counts of all of the books in the Potter series except for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which was the fifth of the seven Potter books. At just over 257,000 words, it stands as the longest in a series of hefty books.
This is important to me, since I wanted to get to the point where I could take any of the Harry Potter books off my shelf (and I have them all because I’ve read them all) and say to myself “I’ve written more words than that.” And now, with this post, I can say exactly that.
Quantity does not equal quality, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. Jo Rowling could write 100 words, and I could write 100,000 words, and I’m that sure that hers would be far more compelling than mine. She has a storytelling gift that is beyond dispute, while I can give you 500 words about going to see Star Wars when I was a kid. There’s really no comparison, other than to say that she writes in English, and I write in English, too.
The sum total of all Harry Potter books is well beyond the million words that I’m aspiring to write, before I die or lose interest in the process. And I won’t even be thinking about approaching this number for at least two more years. But my love and respect for what Rowling has created is hereby acknowledged in this space.
I’m trying to develop my writing skills, and this blog has become my vehicle for doing so. Hopefully, my writing now is more engaging than something I would have written a year ago. Doing anything over and over again, for more than a year, should have that effect. And so for sheer persistence, if nothing else, this is a milestone that I’m happy to put behind me.
Blue Batting Helmet 