How I Learned To Write Fast
Occasionally I see a new indie author looking with dismay at how much time it takes to write, and expressing the opinion that it must be impossible to write a million words a year without the aid of generative AI.
Ha, no. I should point out that I wrote a million words in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, and back then the current AI Tech Bros were still searching for the big scam that would make them rich. (They tried crypto and NFTs in the interim.) ChatGPT would not be inflicted upon the world until the end of 2022.
Admittedly, I didn’t write a million new words in 2021, 2022, and 2023, but that was from a combination of personal issues and illness, and I still hit between 800,000 and 900,00 in those three years. In 2024 and 2025 each I wrote a million new words.
I might or might not hit a million new words in 2026, and it largely depends on how the rest of the year goes. I had to take a lot of time off in spring and summer, and that really slowed me down. I hit 700,000 words with BLADE OF VISIONS, so we’ll see what happens in the remaining four months of the year.
But, yes, if you’re writing full time, a million words in a year is certainly achievable, though as with all things it takes practice.
With that in mind, I thought I would explain how I was able over time to ramp up to writing a million new words in a year.
It was less something I set out consciously to do when I started this in 2011, and more a step-by-step evolutionary process that took several years. By the grace of God I have been indie publishing for almost fifteen and a half years now, so here’s the process of how I ended up writing a million words a year.
1.) Tech writing
Back in the second half of the 2000s, I used to do a lot of tech blogging, mostly about Linux, and I also did tech support, which frequently involved writing FAQs and guides for how to connect your Blackberry or your Windows Mobile device to the company email or whatever. (In retrospect, Blackberry and Windows Mobile were both terrible operating systems, so it’s not surprising the iPhone and later Android blew them out of the water.)
Anyway, tech blogging taught me the value of writing quickly. Back then, you could still make money off Google Adsense, and so if I could write quickly on a tech topic, I could post it, get Google traffic, and then make money from Google Ads. Writing FAQs and guides also taught me the value of writing as concisely and clearly as possible. President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said of public speaking that the best approach to public speaking was to “be sincere, be brief, be seated”, and that’s also true of technical guides.
Back then I was working on novels as well, specifically what would end up becoming the first three Caina books, but I never wrote more than 1,000 words a day of fiction unless I was bored or I was really inspired, neither of which happened all that often.
2.) SOUL OF SERPENTS
By the end of 2010, I had sworn off trying to get traditionally published and decided to focus on tech blogging, but then I got my first Kindle after Thanksgiving in 2010, and I realized there had to be a way to make money off this thing.
This led me to discovering Kindle Direct Publishing, Barnes & Noble PubIt, Smashwords, and the other early self-publishing platforms. I published DEMONSOULED, SOUL OF TYRANTS, and the first three Caina books, and then I decided I would write one more DEMONSOULED book to finish off the story. It had always annoyed me to no end that I had never gotten to write a sequel to SOUL OF TYRANTS, but now the opportunity was here. I decided that I would have a DEMONSOULED trilogy, and SOUL OF SERPENTS would be the last novel I would ever write, which goes to show I may not be that great at telling the future.
SOUL OF SERPENTS was the first book I ever wrote specifically intended for self-publishing instead of submitting it to legacy publishers. I wrote it over the summer of 2011, and I figured if I wrote 1,500 words a day, I could get the rough draft of the book done by the end of the summer, which I did, and I ended up publishing it by the end of August of that month.
That was also when I made DEMONSOULED and CHILD OF THE GHOSTS free for the first time, which meant their sequels started to sell. I was actually beginning to make a little bit of money off my novels for the first time in my life, which was very exciting.
It also meant I wanted to continue the DEMONSOULED series past the third book, which leads us to the next phase of our story.
3.) SOUL OF DRAGONS
In the second half of 2011, I was extremely busy. I had a full-time job, and I had a part-time job that required a lot of off-the-clock preparation.
Despite that, I was determined to write SOUL OF DRAGONS, so I pushed onward when I could. This was when I began writing during my lunch break for the first time, but I often didn’t get to my 1,500 words a day during lunch. So by the time I got home at the end of the day, which was frequently between 9 and 10 PM, I would frequently squeeze in my remaining words, sometimes all of my words, before I went to sleep only to wake up at 5:45 AM to go to the gym.
This level of workload, as you can imagine, absolutely exhausting, and I don’t recommend it.
But I still did it.
I think it was necessary to learn to write a novel under a state of extreme strain, since that was good practice for the 160+ books that would follow SOUL OF DRAGONS. If I wrote only when I was perfectly calm and there was nothing else demanding my attention, I would never get any writing done at all.
I really hate to give career advice to younger people since so much advice they receive these days is obsolete at best and malicious and condescending at worst. In economic terms, 2026 might as well be another planet compared to 1976 or 2000. But sometimes in life you really do have to put in maximum effort over a sustained amount of time, even if it’s approaching midnight, you have to get up in five hours, and you still have five hundred words to go before you can sleep. (That said, if at all possible I would advise only putting in that kind of effort if you’re working for yourself, and not for an employer that will lay you off the instant the stock price dips slightly.)
It took a while, but I did it! SOUL OF DRAGONS came out in February of 2012, and sold pretty well. By this time the books were selling well enough that while I didn’t want to go full-time, they were providing a nice cushion against the unexpected vagaries of life. My full-time employer was also heading towards trouble, so I decided to keep writing.
4.) GHOST IN THE STORM
My next book in early 2012 after finishing SOUL OF DRAGONS was GHOST IN THE STORM. Like with DEMONSOULED and SOUL OF TYRANTS, I was always disappointed that I never go to to continue Caina’s story past the end of GHOST IN THE BLOOD, and so I was excited to start GHOST IN THE STORM.
(Little did I know that Caina’s story would continue for another 30 books past that!)
I wanted to write faster, so I settled on a goal of 3,000 words a day. I would write as much as I could in the morning, then over my lunch break, and then finish my 3,000 words (hopefully) at evening before I went to bed.
I very distinctly recall that in March of 2012 I was in the process of moving to a new apartment. I had bought a couch and scheduled it to be delivered that morning at about 10 AM, so I took the morning off, brought my laptop and a folding chair to the empty apartment, and wrote.
And I kept writing, and writing, and the couch never showed up.
Finally in exasperation I had to go to work, only to get a call at 4 PM that the couch guys had showed up and needed me to let them in. So I begged them to stay where they were, broke the speed limit to get back to the apartment, and arrived just as they were walking back to their truck. Thankfully I was able to convince them to deliver the couch.
As annoying as that day was, it worked out well, because I got the new couch and also wrote several thousand words of GHOST IN THE STORM, which ended up coming out towards the end of April 2012.
5.) GHOST ARIA
In summer of 2012 I wrote SOUL OF SORCERY, which was a huge book that took a long time to write, but it was also the first book I ever wrote that made it to any bestseller list of any kind on Amazon.com, which was a pleasant milestone.
After SOUL OF SORCERY, I started working on GHOST IN THE STONE, and finished it up in early 2013. For both SOUL OF SORCERY and GHOST IN THE STONE, I had stuck to 3,000 words a day, By then I had started working more on marketing, and I had an email newsletter. It had occurred to me that giving something away for free might be a great way to drive newsletter engagement, and I had always liked writing short stories back in the 2000s.
So why not write a bonus short story related to the book and give it away for free?
So that was where GHOST ARIA came from, and it was the first short story I gave away for free with my newsletter. Since then I’ve written hundreds of short stories, and given away tens of thousands of them so I think it was a good decision. 🙂
6.) Dual projects
In 2015, I had the opportunity to write a tie-in novel for a game product, which I wanted to do. Yet I hesitated, because I was working on GHOST IN THE INFERNO at the time, and I knew GHOST IN THE INFERNO would sell and make some money. The tie-in book was a roll of the dice, but it was a good enough opportunity that I wanted to take it. (Or so it seemed at the time.) But I didn’t want to stop working on GHOST IN THE INFERNO.
So, I did both!
GHOST IN THE INFERNO was my main project, and the game book was my secondary one, where I squeezed out a couple hundred words a day. Once GHOST IN THE INFERNO was done, I finished the game book relatively quickly.
Of course, nothing came of it. The game company and the book company fell out and then respectively went out of business, and the game tie-in book never saw the light of day. I would have been better off not writing the tie-in novel.
Except I had gained a valuable skill from the experience. Before that I had only ever worked on one fiction project at a time. Now I had taught myself to do two at once. Ever since then, I have followed my primary/secondary project model, where I’ll try to get as many words down as possible on my primary project, but I’ll also write 250 words or so of my secondary project before I go to the gym in the morning while I’m having my coffee. So when I finish my primary project, I’m usually about 10,000 to 20,000 words into my secondary project, which gets promoted to my new primary project. It’s a nice little speed boost.
I suppose this is another example of the lesson that if you’re going to work really, really hard on something, if possible you should be working for yourself, and not on spec for someone else.
Anyway, the primary/secondary project system has been really helpful to me, especially after I went full time, which we’ll discuss next.
7.) Time for full time
So that was the paradigm I did for the next four years, from 2012 to 2016. I aimed for 3,000 words a day, and mostly kept to it. I usually ended up writing between 500,000 and 600,000 words a year. I finished DEMONSOULED and THE GHOSTS, and then started on FROSTBORN and GHOST EXILE, and then on a whim also started writing CLOAK GAMES in 2015 as a secondary project. (27 books later, CLOAK GAMES/CLOAK MAGE has likewise turned out to be much longer than I thought.) FROSTBORN really took off in 2016, which was nice.
I would have been perfectly content to continue working full-time and writing as a side gig, especially since I no longer had that part-time job because the books were paying better. That said, I knew in the back of my mind I could go full time if it became necessary, especially if my employer went under or had layoffs.
I admit going full time started to become tempting as I took on more work and responsibilities after the layoffs. From 2012 to 2016 I got up at 4:30 AM every work day so I would have time to get everything done. Admittedly, that’s not a big deal, and lots of people have to do that. Yet I admit to this day I still find four in the morning the worst time to get up to use the bathroom, or to wake up before a long road trip or whatever. Waking up and seeing “four” on the clock just somehow seems so hateful. 🙂
Ironically, for all the time I spent thinking about layoffs and preparing contingency plans about I would do afterward, I never actually got laid off.
In 2016 I ended up needing to move to a new state for a combination of family and personal reasons, so I had to quit. I thought about finding a new job in the tech field, but decided the time had come to start writing full time.
Since this was now my full time job, there was no reason not to write as much as possible. In fact, it was probably a good idea if I wanted to eat! That’s when I started trying to hit a million words a year.
8.) The rest of the 2010s.
So from 2016 onward, I wrote full time.
I hit a million new words in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. I finished GHOST EXILE and started GHOST NIGHT, finished FROSTBORN and SEVENFOLD SWORD and wrote most of DRAGONTIARNA. I finished CLOAK GAMES and started CLOAK MAGE, and wrote like the first nine books of SILENT ORDER, and also finished MALISON. I also started doing self-published audiobooks in 2018 with CHILD OF THE GHOSTS and FROSTBORN: THE DARK WARDEN.
2017 was my absolute peak for word count, since I hit 1.4 million that year. Not surprisingly, that was probably my best year of sales ever, since I finished FROSTBORN and started SEVENFOLD SWORD in 2017. But I did hit a million words every year for the rest of the 2010s, including 2020.
However, after 2020, there was trouble ahead, and you’ve probably already guessed what it is.
9.) Fun with Covid!
2020 was a productive year for writing, since I reached 1.2 million words and I took some Photoshop classes, which turned out to be really valuable in terms of cover design and creating marketing/ad images. It’s pretty rare that I don’t use Photoshop for something at least once day now.
However, as it would turn out, my big long-term problem was that the gyms in my local area closed for a long time during Covid and I never found an adequate replacement for them. I ended up gaining a bunch of weight with all the related health concerns that causes.
In 2021, I only reached 974,000 words. Not a big deal, I thought, I’ll hit a million next year.
However, that didn’t work as well, because for a variety of personal and health reasons in 2022, I only reached 814,000.
I also tried a couple of new things during the early 2020s that didn’t really work. In 2021, I published the two Cormac Rogan books, which people liked but really didn’t have an audience. In 2022, I published the first book of what would become STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE, and that didn’t sell very well because I had misread the audience for LitRPG. Essentially the LitRPG market wants isekai/portal fantasy/system apocalypse type stuff, and I had written a science fiction thriller with LitRPG elements.
Then in 2023, I actually got Covid, and that just laid me flat for like six weeks. I got barely any work done in May and about half of June, and I realized I was going to have to make some changes.
10.) Rivah Half-Elven to the rescue!
First of all, I realized that I was doing too much by myself. I thought about stopping audiobooks and the podcast entirely, but instead I hired an audiobook proofer and a transcriptionist/researcher to help with that.
Second, I still wanted to try something new. Cormac Rogan and STEALTH & SPELLS hadn’t worked all that well, but in April of 2023, I had written about 8,000 words of what would become HALF-ELVEN THIEF. When I got sick over the summer I stopped working on it to focus on finishing the DRAGONSKULL and the SILENT ORDER series. But at the end of 2023, I dusted that off the Word file, finished it, and published it in December of 2023. It had a substantially stronger first month than STEALTH & SPELLS, so it was time to embark on the HALF-ELVEN THIEF series.
11.) The Super Summer Of Finishing Things.
I also realized I had gotten too scattered, with something like five ongoing series at once. I decided to cut it down to three, so in the summer of 2025, I finished THE SHIELD WAR, STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE, and GHOST ARMOR. My ongoing series would be BLADES OF RUIN, CLOAK MAGE, and HALF-ELVEN THIEF, and I wouldn’t start a new series until I finished one of those.
From summer 2023 onward, things improved a good deal over 2021-2023. Audiobooks were a lot easier to do with an audiobook proofer to do the final proofing listen, so I’ve done quite a bit more of those.
From 2024 to 2026 I got my weight back down to the pre Covid level with a lot of calorie counting and exercising (aided by sublimating the desire to snack into blowing up Space Pirates in STARFIELD). I did hit a million new words in both 2024 or and 2025.
I’m not sure if I will hit a million words in 2026 or not. As I said earlier I had to take a lot of time off this year in 2026, and it will depend on how the rest of the year goes, but I think 900,000 is definitely achievable.
12.) What have we learned?
So, as you can see, while I can write a million words a year, it took me a long time and a lot of practice to learn how to do it, and if enough other things demand time and attention in a year, it’s not going to happen.
I think the biggest keys to writing as many words in a year as possible are persistence and tenacity. Like there are many times you won’t want to write, (like at midnight when I still had 500 words to go on SOUL OF DRAGONS before I could go to bed) but you will need to push through and get to it. Maybe you cut back a little on time-wasting activities like TikTok, doomscrolling, and TV. (Especially TikTok: it is distressing to see people repeating the nonsense they see on TikTok as absolute fact.) Or maybe you learn to type on 15 minute bursts on your phone in those odd blocks of time like waiting rooms or being on hold that would otherwise go to to waste.
Tenacity is also important. Like, if you wait until circumstances are perfect to write, you’ll never get anything finished. Granted, there are times when writing has to take a back seat to more important things in life. That’s okay, that is as it should be.
And if you can’t get 1,000 words written, aim for 500. If you miss one day, then tomorrow is another day and you can try again.
That also is true over a long time scale as well. If I miss writing a million words in one year, well, tomorrow is another day and next year is another year!
And, of course, thanks for reading all the books! There would be no point in writing a million words a year if people didn’t read them.
-JM