The Apprentice and his Vomit

I don’t know who said, “You have to write three million words before you become a good writer”, but somebody did.

The day I started to write fiction, I became an apprentice. I never logged the amount of words I wrote, what I deleted and edited, never tabled word counts on a per-hour basis. I think it will be more than three million.

There is a purpose to this article. Each craft has an apprenticeship period when the trainee learns, develops, and applies their learning experiences. Novel writing is no different. There is a long period of learning, whether one is aware of it or not. The hammer and nails of writing are words and toil, the wood and glue are paper and ink (or a computer).

Something unique to the trainee happens during the writer’s apprentice period. They develop an inner voice called a muse. Writing becomes easier, words flow quicker, characters develop faster and one does not force them into situations, rather, the characters put themselves there. Re-writes become easier, the 18 novels in the cupboard tend to disintegrate because you know it will take less time to write a new novel than correct one written as an apprentice. The muse becomes a maestro.

For most writers, the apprenticeship is an important part of development. I may not agree with the three million words, but it does teach perseverance, patience, self-awareness, craft, and style. There are thousands of books on writing, but very few are any good. Many contradict each other. Most don’t answer the basics for the early apprentice, such as punctuation, style, and active and passive voices. There are few that stand out, but this is a diet for another article!

There are millions of sources on the internet for an aspiring writer. Some are free, others you pay for. To use a cliché, it is all food for thought: there is no other more precise way to put it. At least let me elaborate:

The unconscious mind eats up all information presented and implied, and thinks about it. It is churned a while, warms up, then is regurgitated, half-digested on paper, sicked up in some explosive manner from the gut. This raw splattering of ideas is the muse at work, with all the chunks of ideas and wrong turns. It has thin bile one can immediately wipe away, and that sticky stuff that somehow glues everything together. It’s all there, in some form. However, it takes a craftsman to turn a muse’s vomit into a working piece of literary art, don’t you agree?

I believe I am nearing the end of my apprenticeship. It has been difficult but I have enjoyed the journey, and looking forward to the next stage of my own personal evolution with all its crafting and disappointments, rejections and regurgitations, successes and near misses. What other profession could affect me so personally?