How You Can Write an Epic Ton of Words

Get an elephant’s worth of words published or my name’s not Edgar!

All the great writers tell us to write a lot if we want to get good at it. It’s the most obvious advice. Practice a skill and you get better. But what’s the goal? How much writing do we need to do exactly?

There must be a way to measure our output. There has to be a gold standard, a word count, a bar to aim for. It’s good to have goals. Aim for the stars, right? Then crash on the moon in a dazzling ball of flame because, poor piloting and low spaceship build quality. Shoulda went with the Tesla instead of that old Ford junk.

I think you should aim for one epic ton of words. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? I might as well ask you to walk to Australia from Alaska carrying a watermelon. But it isn’t as bad as that. You can leave the watermelon behind, okay?

I figured out how we can get our ton of words published. Just like the Cylons, I have a plan. It doesn’t involve eradicating the entire human race just to propagate my robot brethren throughout the galaxy, either! You don’t even need a Battlestar.

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” ~ Richard Bach

All it takes is a little old-fashioned elbow grease, a bunch of time you were going to waste staring at your phone screen anyway, and a mop.

Well, maybe not the mop. But you have to keep going no matter what. Put down the phone and warm up your keyboard!

How could you achieve your own epic ton of words? It’s simple! Just not easy.

But What is a Ton of Words?

Electronic words weigh nothing much. Ever tried weighing a blog post? They don’t like to sit on the scale, just keep sliding off. Slippery little devils.

We need to translate this into paper so it makes sense.

I’m going to take a few liberties and assume that we will write single sided sheets of 8.5 x 11 inches office paper. We will double-space it for easy editing.

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour

That will be about 250 words per page, using 12-point Arial font. Using regular printer paper, that’s about 200,000 sheets. 50 million words.

50 million words. Now THAT is an epic ton of words.

If you’re worried about the environment, don’t. We aren’t actually going to print all of these sheets off. I might be crazy, but not that crazy! Do you know how much the ink would cost? I’m on a budget here!

How Long Will Writing and Publishing 50 Million Words Take?

Not as long as you think, if you publish them in more than one place. Let’s break that elephant down into leathery gray sentence chunks and ship him out the door.

Let’s say you write 2000 words per day average. You end up publishing those words. This will take a lot of years to hit 50 million, if that’s all you do.

But you can do more! You use leverage on your own words like a crazy day trader let loose on the money markets without any experience. Print those words like paper grew on trees or something!

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” ~ Stephen King

Take those same words and publish them in 3 places, and you cut down the time it takes drastically. What if you write articles daily or weekly and put them onto different platforms? Each instance of publication counts, people.

Books Carry a Lot of Weight

Do you read a ton of books? I do. Maybe I’ve been playing a one handed game of war. No wonder I was losing.

Let’s turn that around and create a ton of books. Put that shoe on the other foot. It won’t fit, because a righty doesn’t work on lefty, but it will be interesting to watch you try to walk with your shoes on weird, won’t it!

Take those same words and write a book that sells 5000 copies. If you’re a good enough word wizard to create all that content, you can fill a book easy. You did a lot of the work already!

According to this Quora answer, “With 16 oz per pound and 2,000 lbs per US ton, so 32,000 oz per US ton, a ton of paperbacks would include 2,909 books, while a ton of hardcover book would include 1,561 books.”

Now you have something you can accomplish!

Articles + Books = Ton

That’s the formula to get this done.

Write on a schedule. Publish your work in more than venue. Collect or rewrite it to create a book. Success!

“If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” — Edgar Rice Burroughs

Now you know how you write an epic ton of words. I hope you join me in creating one epic ton!

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