Bathroom Monologue: One Million Words

"They say you have to write a million words to get really good at writing. I don’t know who “they” are – I’ve tried to avoid learning it, because learning the “they” behind any such claim tends to deflate it. Now I’ve focused and picked my word. It’s the master word: “word.” All the other ones tumble out of it, you see. So I’ll write it a million times, but not all at once. My hand would cramp. Instead I write it a hundred times a day. That’s 3,000 words a month, and 36,500 a year. In a couple months I’ll pick up the pace, when a measly hundred words gets dull. The target is a thousand a day – that’s 365,000 a year, which means in just three years I’ll be passed a million and hanging with Gore Vidal or some shit. I’m on a good roll so far. Get distracted now and then, wanting to write another word. Maybe a shorter word. Sometimes I want to write full sentences or ideas. I have a separate notebook for that – the garbage stuff, not the million-word craft. After I’m famous I’ll revisit these vanity notebooks with their dialogues and stories and see if they were worth anything. I imagine, one million words along, they’ll all look like kiddy crap. Nothing you’d learn from."