A million words

872,000 in publication, the rest of my output archived by the Wayback Machine and shelved at public libraries, or destroyed by WGA. Screenplays had to be renewed every 10 years or they were shredded. Doesn't include my letters, emails, forum posts, published magazine articles, a couple hundred pages that I typed in a tack room by 6V lantern light, and a couple hundred more filed in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. I've written in a penthouse overlooking Sunset Boulevard, deluxe rental houses in Holland, Costa Rica, and Australia, an unheated garret in Hilversum, a basement in London, a cheap Beverly Blvd motel, maybe three dozen offices, apartments, and prison cells, capped by five years in a sheet metal Ozarks dairy barn. A million words became a difficult 40-year project.

 

Was any of it any good? Maybe about half. Do other people write a million words? Sure. Kipling did. The execrable Dickens and Faulkner. Respectable Churchill, Rand, and Hugo. I declined to compete with Beat Generation giants or biographers or fat ladies who cranked out formula romance. Chandler authored a million words, half of which were excellent. I'd like to burn every rotten syllable penned by King and his spiritual ancestor Poe. I don't think RLS or Hammett wrote a million words. Clueless Zane Grey did.

 

I'm not certain that young people read or write. I know two men who collected every Tom Clancy book. We don't have a lot to discuss. A neighbor lady collected every cookbook and diet book in hardcover, plus twenty shelves jammed full of mystical junk. Another gal inquired if I had any dragons in my latest, which I did, although he only survived a single page. The best thing to do with dragons is to slay 'em.

 

The literary enterprise is like a dragon, or it was for me, and it was for Fitzgerald and O. Henry, a hoary, insatiable, insistent, non-negotiable life taker. When a man writes (not applicable to the fair sex, who write more than men do) the business of writing is to pit your wit and wisdom against every other man in human history. No reason to attempt that, unless you have new weapons.

 

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