The One-Million Word Challenge · 12:19pm Feb 2nd, 2016
Couple fun facts in this blog post, as well as some thoughts on an idea I've had for a while.
Let's start with a fun fact, though!
Did you know FimFiction used to have a "words read" counter on your account page? It was pretty depressing, even three years ago. I can't imagine how many pony words I've read by now. Also, if I recall, this counter was viewable by anyone who clicked on you user page, so they could see exactly how addicted to pony you were. Removing it was probably one of the smarter changes Knighty has implemented.
A few years ago, a scholar named Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called "Outliers," which would have been unremarkable except that it introduced to the larger public an interesting idea called the "10,000 Hour Rule." This rule "claim[ed] that the key to achieving world class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours."
This claim got quite a bit of press, and the media (and American society at large) promptly applied it to almost every skill imaginable, not just the highest-level performers that Gladwell meant (i.e. concert musicians, top-tier athletes, etc).
In the years since, there's been quite a bit of push-back against this 10,000 hour rule. Critics pointed out that it's a fairly arbitrary number, that plenty of skills don't require elite-level expertise to perform well at, and that Gladwell's sample size wasn't exactly scientific in the first place. But, regardless, that 10,000 hour idea stuck in many people's minds.
And why not? It makes sense, after all. Practice improves most skills, and 10,000 hours of practice is certainly a lot. It seems reasonable that practicing a skill for 10,000 hours (which is about 5 years, if you make it your full-time job) will make you very good at that skill.
So, if we accept Gladwell's thesis, what does that mean for writers?
But first, fun fact #2!
I just got back from a nice little ramen shop down the street, where I had some sake and Japanese beer along with my torimisoyaki, and consequently I'm a little buzzed. This has nothing to do with the rest of this blog.
Anyway, back to 10,000 hours. What does that mean for writers?
If I'm writing at a decent clip, I can churn out about 1,000 words per hour. That assumes I already have a well-realized idea in my head, and all I'm doing is putting words on paper. If you include the time I spend thinking of a plot and characters and narrative arc and editing and all that jazz, my actual words-per-hour probably drops to around 400 (complete guess).
I sense people are getting bored of numbers, so have a cute pony!
Yesss, that's it. Source.
Do a little math, and that works out to... about four million words. That's a lot of words! And it assumes those words are written in what Gladwell would call deliberate practice -- that is, I'm not just jamming on my keyboard; I'm actually trying to improve with each hour of writing. Those are, uh, optimistic, let's say.
So, optimistically, I would need to write 4 million words to hit Gladwell's 10,000 hour 'expertise' mark. That's obviously an ambitious goal, more along the lines of a lifetime accomplishment than something that, as a hobbyist, I will be hitting in the near future.
But what about one-million words? That's a lot more reasonable. In fact, according to FimFiction's handy little word counter, I'm over halfway there already:
Of course, that's four-and-a-half years of effort. If you add in all the unpublished words and original fiction I've written, the total comes to around 650,000 words, or ~150,000 words per year. In other words, I've got almost three years to go until I hit the 1,000,000 word mark, assuming I keep at my current pace.
Fun fact #3!
For the average Writeoff short-story competition, I write nearly 10,000 words, or about 1% of the one-million word goal. The most recent Writeoff round turned in nearly 220,000 words worth of entries.
Where am I going with all this? Just a simple question, actually: Have you written 1,000,000 words? Do you think doing so is a noteworthy milestone? Is there any correlation between words-written and quality of writing?
I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of how much I write for various "Formal" things (reviews, stories, certain blog posts, ect.).
Total pony words written: 388,514 (since July of 2013 - only 167,981 has been published)
Total pony fanfic reviews words written: 419,269 (since December 2014)
Total pony article words written: 48,867 (since November 2013)
Total words "on writing" written: 25,096 (since June 2014)
Total video games review words written: 66,474 (since December 2013)
Total original fiction written: 22,949 (since August 2015)
So I've written a bit over 400k words of prose fiction and almost 500k words of reviews since I started keeping track (if you consider video game reviews and pony story reviews to be the same thing - in all fairness, that's debatable).
Except it is actually even more than that for reviews, as I'm not counting my ridiculously in-depth reviews/analysis of 4th edition D&D books from back in the day (circa when 4th edition D&D came out, and over the next two years, I wrote several hundred thousand words on them).
Incidentally, one of the problems with the 10,000 hour rule is what you pointed out: basically, there's a big difference between "gainful practice" and just plain old "doing the thing". I've known people who have drawn for many, many years and shown only very marginal improvement over that time span, while others have vastly improved their artistic skills in far less time because they obsessively spent time drawing every day and pushing their boundaries and mastering new things.
Another note about mastery:
I think that reading is a skill that people take for granted, but I think that the same general rule of mastery applies to it as well. I was a ridiculously voracious reader as a youth (and, well, still am pretty voracious these days - I read several "real" novels a month, on top of quite a few pony words and some original fiction as well) and I think it made a rather large difference both in how quickly I can read and how much I can pick up on while reading.
Because I missed this question initially:
So, some observations about this from myself.
I saw several huge leaps in my writing ability when I started out writing prose fiction; the difference between Crepes and The Stolen Date is quite large, and those were written one after the other.
That said, Crepes itself is in some respects suspiciously well-written for someone who had never written prose fiction outside of school.
Some folks also may have noticed that a lot of my stories are written from a somewhat distant perspective which centers on character action - dialogue and some body language - but that the scenes tend to be set up at the beginning but generally fairly sparsely used.
The reason for this is that I actually had spent a great deal of time practicing a particular aspect of prose fiction via tabletop roleplaying. In tabletop roleplaying, you are typically describing what your character is saying and doing, but you don't reveal their inner thoughts (or at least, that's the style I'm most familiar with at most of the gaming tables I've been to). This is how I always roleplayed, so I spent a huge amount of time fundamentally practicing exactly that - focusing on establishing a character's character via their actions and speech.
My seeming obsession with dialogue, and my relatively sophisticated ability to write dialogue, lead me to write in a certain way. When I started writing pony fiction, then, in some ways I was very familiar with some of the most important principles of characterization, and I spent a huge amount of time trying to get the voices of the characters right so I could hear them in my head and properly convey them. But this also lead me to write in a certain way, and it leads towards a tendency to what is often described as "talking heads".
This is why I occaisionally write stories that are very divergent from my usual style - Temptation was the first such story I wrote, where I threw myself into an entirely different style of writing, going from the inside of the head of the character instead of the outside. It is actually really obvious if you look at The Stolen Date that I added in all of Rainbow Dash's inner narration after the fact; I didn't write it that way originally at all because I didn't know how to do it naturally, and so I had to really struggle to get it in and properly convey Rainbow Dash's mindset. Temptation did it much better, and Through Glass was much better still. But it is still not natural to me, because when I think about characters doing stuff, I think about what you can see from the outside; I really struggle to write stories from a close third-person or first-person perspective.
Heck, I don't even think like that.
I feel like writing stuff that is very divergent from my usual style really helps me learn a lot more about how to write, though - I feel like every time I've stretched myself to write a kind of story I wasn't used to writing, I've gotten better at it and more used to it.
Incidentally, this sort of stretching myself is what lead to stuff like The Collected Poems of Maud Pie and The Legend of Falling Rocks, Buffalo Brave, and I have to say, I do feel like writing stuff which is very unusual for myself ends up feeling like it teaches me a lot more about writing than writing the same general kind of stuff I usually do.
So, yes, I feel that not only does writing more make a difference, but your specific areas of focus and particular obsessions can make a big difference in how well you write some things.
But that's now, after you've been writing for years, right? Isn't it realistic to assume that you were slower when you started and that this speed is the outcome of already having put some time in towards mastery of the skill? If you had been running regularly for years, you wouldn't assume that your starting speed matched your current one. Therefore, I think your calculations are the opposite of optimistic and instead paint the obstacle as greater than it is because you're calculating based on having your current performance rate at the beginning.
I've heard it said elsewhere that your first million words are essentially crap and... hang on, let me look up the real quote. Ah yes. David Eddings (or perhaps Ray Bradbury) may have said it:
That's where most people stop with quotes like this. It's interesting advice, but the number seems to have been arbitrary to make the point, because:
(And there's a lot more on the topic here).
Just checked and I'm not quite up to a million words. 876,000, in fact, in all my published fiction. Close.
What I feel I've not yet hit though are what I can only think of as the power words, those sentences so dense with meaning and character that they can, if not entirely carry a work, then at least define it. A story I always like is the possibly apocryphal tale of when Ricardo Montalbán was approached to reprise the character Khan in The Wrath of Khan. Initially he refused, citing the fact that Khan had so few lines in the film. Then he read the script and realised that, whilst Khan had only a relatively few lines, his lines were so powerful that there didn't need to be more. He took the part and we got the greatest Star Trek film of the series.
Perhaps it takes a million crap words before you finally get to those good ones? I'm not sure. My experience is that some writers reach that stage far sooner than others, perhaps because of innate talent or just a deeper understanding of what is meaningful and impactive. I'd suspect a million words and 10,000 hours are arbitrary numbers just plucked from the air. A definition of scope rather than a rule to be followed, meant to put across the idea that you need to do a thing to be good at it and that it will take time and effort.
It's that time and effort that requires the rule to exist, and from my perspective, here's why: Something I've always noticed in my art is that a lot of practice takes place on plateaus, in which I do the same thing over and over without appearing to change. What I'm really doing is creating efficiencies of technique, so whilst apparent quality might not change over that period, I will be absorbing ideas and techniques and unconsciously adopting more efficient means of performing what I already know, and all of that will abruptly spring out after a few months of sameness. I've found that I improve dramatically if I spend a few months doing the same thing, take a short break and then start again. The jump in quality can be profound.
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I feel like writing speed is dependent primarily on how much you are stretching yourself. A new writer and an experienced writer stretching themselves similarly will likely write at similar paces, but the experienced writer will be producing much higher quality prose.
There is, I think, an upper limit on how quickly you can write as well, no matter how talented you are, because you have to construct stuff in your mind to write.
I generally write at about 1,000 words per hour, but that's because I don't actually focus very well on writing; when I completely tune out other distractions and focus on nothing but writing, I write somewhere in the realm of 500 words of prose per 10-20 minutes (non-fiction is much quicker to write). The first chapter of Shotgun Wedding, for instance, was written in 45 minutes in a single sitting back in 2013.
So not fair. I wish they still had that. Now I have to look at my favorites to count the number of words read, but even that is off considering I have 710 unread chapters... Somehow. So, all of the words combined are 41,147,804. Let's say an average chapter length is around 5,000 words. So, 5,000*710 is 3,550,000. 41,147,804 - 3,550,00 is 37,597,804. So let's say an error rate of around 2 million in either direction, considerations variations in chapter lengths from the average.
And that is only on this site since 2012. I don't read as much as I used to, though. I still have an account of fanfiction from 2009 as well, and I used to read there more than here. I always had at least eight story tabs open at once. I like to feel I learned how to write via 'osmosis' from reading so much. I'm not that good at the moment, but I am better than I would be if I never read due to the fact that I never payed attention in English class until tenth grade.
Now writing a million on the other hand, well, that might never happen for me. I could technically get out 1,000 words every day if I had a plot 100% thought out, getting to a million in a bit less than two years, but writers block is a bitch.
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Speaking from my own experiences in writing, I've actually slowed down from when I first started. (For reference, I used to write ~7k words/week, and now I barely scrape 1k/week) Personally, I attribute this to how much I've learned over the years, about what's good writing and what's bad writing. I'm more aware of the words that come out on paper and am therefore more responsive to what I should swap out, what to nix, what to expand, etc. At the same time, though, that awareness begets caution, and an immutable effort to nip those problems in the bud rather than just spewing words on a page (even though it's all just as terrible, speaking from a relative skill standpoint).
I did have much more free time and blissful inspiration back in the early fandom, as college and a budding fandom are wont to foster, but I still can't shake the feeling that I just write so much slower nowadays. Call that confirmation bias if you want, but yeah. (As an outlier of sorts to that, though, I did pound out 3.2k words in effectively two days of writing for the current write off, so I honestly don't know.)
Anyway, I'm curious to know how many others are in the same boat as me.
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I believe the reason they got rid of this was because people were just clicking through story chapters to rack up their words read counter to impossible numbers, just for the sake of showing off. It was a really fun tidbit for those that didn't artificially inflate the numbers, though.
I'm inclined to think that writing one million words isn't a milestone in and of itself unless, like you said, one is consciously writing. If that is the case, then I would assume that by the time a writer reaches a million words, they have written long enough to have acquired the ability to "see" themselves in their writing. I've only written slightly over 500,000 words, including pony fiction, personal fiction, and personal essays on various topics, but at this point, I've written enough to notice my personal writing habits and quirks. I've learned how to recognize the actual mental and physical reaction that I have when my prime writing hours begin. I know what I need to read to create within my mind a fertile soil for the style in which I would like to write, as well as how I would like to emote things within that style. I can feel when I'm being lazy with my words or if I am not digging as far as I could with their meaning, even if I have no idea what to put down on the page instead. Not to say that I don't have a long way to go and grow (which I clearly do), but the one thing that has been a consistent to getting me to that objective state is forcing myself to be conscious, particularly to force myself to be uncomfortable when I am comfortable.
Just to expand on that, I've reached a personal point in my writing where if the words are flowing far too easily, it is a sign that it's time for me to switch it up, change an element, add an element, etc. Experimentation and openness to experimentation has been key for me in terms of writing growth. For example, once I felt that writing in third person (past tense) had become mundane, forcing myself to write something in a drastically different way from a drastically different perspective both: 1. Kept me aware of the writing areas in which I had not delved and was not particularly good with and 2. Made writing in my standard (third person, past tense) far easier.
For me it's like running with ankle weights. After you take them off, running now feels like floating. After I write something that was extremely difficult for me to write, I can go back to my usual style and write with ease. On the flip side, this exercise does tend to make me bored with my set standards after I return to them. : \
All that to say, by one million words, if a writer has consistently and consciously been working and molding and forming and reforming their writing, I cannot fathom why they wouldn't be an expert upon reaching that point. And if they do reach that point, that is the milestone. Granted, the same thing may happen for some writers at two million words and some at 300,000. I think the number is meant to be representative of the time and effort spent reaching it, basically.
Also:
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Words that I live by every single time that I write. Though I've never read this particular quote before, it rings so true to me. This coupled with delving deeply into character psychology on the page has always worked for me.
(I'm totally cheating because Night is 525 of it)
I'll drop my numbers in among the scholars and the peeps who know what they're a-doin'.
I'm not sure that its a milestone developmentally as a writer, but it seems like a milestone and I think I like it regardless!
But I do think that there is a lot of garbage in anybody and the "write until you don't suck anymore" thing has always been my jam. It obviously hasn't worked, yes, but I'm also not to a million yet, so maybe that's the answer.
Did ... did I really write that much? How did that happen?
3728513 I think your avatar might hold the answer to that.
You should get "buzzed" more often.
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Hm, once a week or so is enough!
It doesn't take much for me to get buzzed :(
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orig06.deviantart.net/58df/f/2013/300/d/e/camo_girl_pinup_by_kelleeart_by_kelleeart-d6s14bl.jpg
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I write at... about 100 words per three hours.
I'd feel too embarrassed to quote and comment what was already quoted and commented upon,.. eh. Idiotic self-limitation.
But there are a lot of things that would affect the results of this "10,000 Hour Rule." idea. Subjectively, I like it, but those milestones are pretty symbolic. Defining "world class expertise in any skill" would seem arbitrary too. And what is a skill? I'd think opening doors, cooking and writing are very different in complexity, yet all valid skills to have.
Comparing skills in a context of success seems arbitrary, and praticing and planning hours may not equate each other.
Also amongst all those things TD pointed out; approach changes alot in results. Heh.
Personally, I've hardly written anything on computers, and don't have a good situation to learn to write on computers, just sitting here grates my comfort and focus. So I'm limited. The stuff I can do that I care of has leaped in bonds these, maybe 8 or so months since I moved here, however.
I'd think yes. But my guess is at a strong correlation of a correlation: People who have written more have likely thought of and considered their quality of writing more. And thus have likely practiced improvement of their quality of writing more. Furthermore, they may have readjusted their attempts at improvement more; changing how they train and how they review their own performance.
TLDR: People who practiced alot are also more likely to have aquired a defined personal goal or interest. And thus be more specialised in their approach. All very subjective ideas. A person who's done the marathon more than once is expected to be better, I suppose.
Still, counting by hour seems arbitrary, and calculating many factors might be impratical. I think it is important to be open to reconsidering an approach or set idea, however. Especially the ones taken for granted. Feels right, too.
To me, my results so far feel right, and I think they are acceptable. And being in good confidence with myself means less time and mental focus lost when I learn. Thus, I feel the 'practice makes perfect' idea presented here can fit perfectly in some ways, but neglects to mention the underlining correlations clearly and succintly.
TLDR2:—I favor clarity of purpose and mind over raw time in a dedicated environment or situation. Although you do need to have something to work with it.
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IIRC the "official line" was that the query necessary to generate the number was a big performance issue, one that would only get worse as the site grew, so it got the axe.
I do wish we still had it; I'd be mildly interested to know what my total read count is, and it would be a slog to go hunt down and add every fic I've ever read to a bookshelf just to get the wordcount.
As if we needed more proof short skirts is the best author on the site.
Holy cow. That doesn't count Buggy and the Beast yet.
Georg: Proof that Quantity occasionally outstrips Quality.
I so wish we still had the words read counter, even just personally displayed instead of publicly. I want to know if I'm over a hundred million words read yet.
I'd also love to see a words commented counter. I don't write any stories, but I suspect my total comments are pretty sizable. It'd be a bit deceptive though. With my tendency to pull quotes out of the story in question, it might be pretty inaccurate.
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Heh, I actually have shelves of all my upvoted/no voted/downvoted stories for tracking purposes.
Sadly, stories I read before shelves were implemented are only sporadically added to my lists.
Still, according to those lists, I've read 7,752,940 + 4,122,045 + 5,326,885 = 17,201,870 words.
Not counting writeoff entries, which probably adds 1-2 million to that.
That's in... less than three years.
I read 22 Discworld books last year as well on top of my other reading.
And sadly, I could do a lot more reading than I do; I waste way too much time arguing on the Internet, one of my three great loves. D: Also reading the news. Which is what tends to lead to the former.
I haven't read a ton of CIG's stories, and Estee still has a bunch I haven't read, and I haven't read a lot of Wanderer D and Obs's stuff, and SS&E has tons of big stories I haven't even started reading, and I haven't read Fallout:Equestria, and...
I have half a million words just in one single Scrivener file (the one for my favorite original fic universe.) I probably need to start breaking that out, it makes my computer kind of choke when I open it these days...
I've got a quarter million or so of published ponyfic, and easily that much again in all the various unpublished pieces I've noodled around with.
And that doesn't count any of my non-pony fanfic, or other original fic. The original fic especially there is a ton of. Adding it all up it's probably creeping up on 2 million words.
I do feel like just plain writing lots does get you somewhere, but that "somewhere" is basically just simple technical competence. I can put together a story that's grammatical, the plot hangs together and makes sense, it has some good pacing and follows some kind of story arc... but I can't make a story that's gripping, amazing, or truly stellar, that stuff is less quantifiable, and less easily practiced. I approach it only occasionally with rare flashes of inspiration and a good dose of dumb luck. It can't be arrived at merely by putting enough words down, it requires something extra. Life experience and having something to say? Some bit of philosophy or deeper understanding of stories? Just luck? I don't know, if I knew I'd probably write better stories!
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Are you actually focusing on writing, though? Or are you just getting distracted/pulled away doing other things all the time?
It is easy to spend a ton of time not-writing while "writing".
The total fiction I've ever written in my life probably amounts to... maybe 1500 words.
...Why am I even commenting here?
3729245 Everybody starts somewhere.
"Written" might become a very complicated term here. On one end of the scale there's copying down 'word' four million times. On the other, there's… well just pick your favorite master of the writerly art and a million of their masterful words. I've been writing stories of some sort since before I could legibly write them down. I started my first novel as a teenager and have rewritten it roughly four times (and want to eventually rewrite it again). I've since written a novel worthy of being sold (or so I hope), +160k words of MLP fan fiction, ~20k words of other fan fiction. I can probably claim to have written somewhere between 300k and 600k thus far in my lifetime, but that number feels meaningless. I know I'm a better writer than I was a year ago, or even ten thousand words ago, but each and every time I start a new project, I feel like I'm starting the learning process all over.
Also, when I read something by one of my favorite wordsmiths, I realize how little I know
Yeah, that feels about right.
I like the idea of the challenge, but I think there's an important detail here. It's not 10,000 hours doing rote repetition, but 10,000 hours practicing the skill. And I'd argue that first-pass writing is rarely practicing the skill. You practice writing when you're challenged. When you revise, edit, and look how to improve your drafts.
Revisions are probably the biggest one. If you include revisions, I've probably written 1,000,000 words of Siren Song alone. For instance, the first chapter of Daring Do is 23,000 words, and I wrote it (from scratch) ten times, so that's 230,000 words right there. In fact, given that I rewrite nearly ever story I write at least once, if you're counting the words I've actually written my total is at least doubled.
Then of course, you add editing -- which for me is probably a 50% increase. Pre-planning is a few hours per story at least, if not more. And then you get all the time just spent reading others writing and trying to figure out how to steal their talent. I guess what I'm saying is, writing isn't a skill you practice by rote, but a trade you have to gradually absorb. And yeah, if you spend 10,000 hours doing nothing but focusing on your writing, I do think that's a good indication you'll be a better writer.
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Have I told you how insane that is, by the way? Because it is.
My stories are lucky if they get a light editing pass. In fact, the "editing pass" usually consists of me re-reading the scene I just wrote in preparation for writing the next scene.
I have lots of errors in my stories :(
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Just for funsies, I added up all you and your alts' horsewords.
Now I need more sake.
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Holy crap. Ten times?
I'd go mad.
I guess that's one way to improve your stuff, though.
My stuff varies quite a bit in that capacity; some things get an editing pass, some get some rewrites, and some get totally rewritten.
From my records, from my published stories, I've published 167,981 words, and from those stories, I've tossed out 61,911 words. That's not counting immediate rewrites, where I write a scene, then go back and immediately completely rewrite it. That's like, where I actually write something, move on, then go back and rip it out and rewrite it as part of the writing/editing process.
3728661 To give a truly official explanation of it is that it's almost impossible to do in a nice performant way, period.
Many people who know about caching probably think "oh duh, just increment a number by x words when you read a chapter" but this has a massive issue - chapters can be edited. Thus if you read a chapter at 1k words, it's edited to 2k words and you unmark it as read, you've now read -1000 words. Of course, flipping the logic would make it trivial to getting an infinite amount of words read and you know people would do that. There's 3 solutions there:
a) Store number of words a chapter had when you marked it as read. Problem being that this adds another 50% data to an already MASSIVE table.
b) Don't decrement when you mark as unread. This has the problem of needing to keep storing rows even when you mark as unread.
c) Recalculate the true number every time you mark a chapter read/unread. This has the original problem of being super slow because the chapter read table is missing an index to make that fast, and adding it would add a ton of data on again.
None of these are nice, but it's ignoring potentially the biggest issue - the social one that's already been mentioned. When people see a number like "words read" or "comments posted", there is a natural inclination for some people to treat it like a challenge. This is bad in every way for a website. Dunno about you guys but I've been around forums long enough to see the damage post counts do. This is why Fimfiction has nothing like that and I think it's all the better for it. Nobody has an artificially boosted presence when having a comment they've made viewed by someone else. Sure it'd be "nice" to see how many words you've read, but the cost - in performance and socially - is not worth it.
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Makes sense; as with all things programming, the solution looks simple ("add chapter word count to running tally when you read a chapter") until you think about edge cases (marking chapters unread/editing chapters/people are inherently flawed).
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
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For the record, ten is a lot even for me. Two or three is much more common.
I just felt that the last chapter of Siren Song was good enough that... well. If the opening of the sequel wasn't perfect, everyone would think I'd jumped the shark. So I was more than a little perfectionist about it.
By Draft 9, my editor was getting quite upset, because he'd thought Drafts 1-9 were all fine, and didn't understand why I kept insisting the feel was wrong. He didn't want edit the same chapter that many times either. So I said: "Fine, just take a look at this last one, and tell me which of the ten you think is best."
He read it and, after a little while, said he saw what I was getting at. That #10 did actually have a much better tone and the changes helped the pacing.
My response was: "Why would you validate my insanity? ;-;"
3730446 I'm wondering whether it would be possible to only display the number privately, and instead of it just being there all the time and hogging up resources, have a button - or maybe a collapsible display that would be collapsed by default - which would calculate it on demand?
I'm sure that users would only check it every now and then, which should give a huge performance boost over having to calculate it every time someone visits a user page. A clear way to trigger the query would also make it acceptable for it to take a noticeable amount of time to complete, obviously with a spinner in place to indicate that it's working. Triggering the query manually and having to wait a minute for it to complete is far better than just having elements on the page take ages to load for no apparent reason.
Additionally, to prevent OCD maniacs refreshing their count every 30 seconds, you could have a cache storing the most recently calculated value for however long would be appropriate - maybe even as much as 24 hours. Users would easily accept that their count doesn't update immediately - after all, they encounter the same situation all the time in places like the youtube view/like counter. Given the amount of data already stored per user, a single extra 32-bit int field shouldn't be significant.
The reason I'm saying all this is because sometimes, I really want to know how much I've read, and I'm not the only one.
I took this way too literally and actually computed a Pearson’s correlation coefficient. It came out as 0.25, which suggests there’s at least some correlation (0 means “independent”, 1 means “proportional”, -1 means “inversely proportional”, so 0.25 is a weak but positive correlation).
N.B. : Don’t take this seriously. My data set was way too small (20 points), biased (I picked the authors I follow, excluding alts and friends), and inacurrate (I used the word count reported by FimFiction, and rated “quality” subjectively by myself).
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Seems legit. I mean, if you're trying to measure quality, you could do worse than just asking yourself "how good of an author do I think this person is?"
Aww, come on, I thought it was really cool. I liked seeing that number go up, like a highscore, and still miss it.
Anyway, interesting post. I haven't really written in years now, though, and probably have barely hit 10,000 words together (even taking into account things written in different fandoms)... Maybe I'll get some day back to it. Hopefully.
Actually that word counter thing still exist, but i think they made it readable by the account owner only. It can be found on the top right hand side of your favorites folder.
4413382
I believe that's how many words there are in your favorites folder. The old counter actually counted the number of words you had read to date, which might be higher or lower, depending on how many stories you put in your favorites folder but never get around to reading.