A million words, to find your tone

A million words, to find your tone

A couple of months back, I finished writing my brand new-old fantasy book. A fresh, third attempt at an old idea. Why, you may ask. Well, the old one just wasn’t good enough. Despite its verbosity, almost three quarters of a million words, it was clunky, ponderous, perhaps even boring. And reading, I was quite surprised, and delighted, by how much my writing style has changed over the years, and decades. This got me wondering. How many words does it take for one to find their “true” voice?

 

Teaser
Image taken from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Looking my first published series, The Lost Words, even there, within the series, I can see definite progression in my pacing, characterization, plot complexity and depth, my use of all sorts of writing “tricks” that help make a story stand out. From one book to another, there’s change. But then, I think, the style plateaus midway, and the transition from book three to book four is rather mild.

Then again, I noticed the Prince Dietrich series to be, again, different. I’m not talking about the actual setting, or the specific characters, or even the choice of the genre. Those are obvious. I’m talking about how readable, fun, crisp my words are, how fun it is to actually read the written material. From there on, I think my writing has become unique, signature me.

So what happened until that point?

Well, we have the aforementioned fantasy book. 650K words. I then tried to write five or six novels, and each time I got stuck around chapter 15 mark. I think I was mostly exploring ideas and concepts, and wasn’t quite ready to make them into a cohesive story. Later on, I would use many of the elements from these different attempts in The Lost Words. A bit of this, a bit of that. Adam is a character from one of the books. The gods come from another. Magical artifacts? That’s a third one. And so forth. We’re talking 250K words, at least.

Add to that the four volumes of The Lost Words, and we get another swell million. And so, it would seem my title is wrong. It’s not a million. It’s two millions. I think, looking back, it took me five finished works, five or six unfinished works, and about fifteen years to finally zone in on what my writing should be like.

Today, I have a couple of really neat books waiting to be published. Page turners, tight action, tight characters, tension, drama, you name it. These works all happened in the last decade or so. Once I fully “spread my wings” with Prince Dietrich, from then on, I think I’ve found my natural cadence, on every level of book writing.

So, if you’re starting your writing career, or even just a hobby, and you’re perchance reading this novel, bear this mind. Don’t let the first few hundred thousand words discourage you. They will probably not be as good as you want them. But the more you write, the more fun you will have, the more you will hone your skills.

And that would be all. Write on.