By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I just wrote half a million words. It was not a goal, but it feels like an accomplishment.
In 2016, after our youngest child graduated from high school and was off to college, I decided to take my lifelong love of writing a bit more seriously. Why?
I like it. I wanted to publish a book (or two or three). Because I don’t golf or woodwork or garden, I thought it might be the pastime I needed as I approached my golden years.
How does one go about taking writing more seriously? By writing, of course!
I started a blog. Low tech dinosaur that I am, I watched videos on how to set up a webpage. I built one, bought a domain, and was off to the races.
I just needed content. What should I write?
Mark Twain gets credit for saying, “Write what you know.” Seems wise.
But so does the counter-advice…write what you do not know. That seems even more intriguing and interesting.
As a result, I have done both, every week for the last nine years, starting on September 27, 2017. After some time, my pattern emerged.
It turns out that I write in ten basic categories: (1) Church; (2) School and Boyhood Days; (3) Saints and Souls; (4) Family; (5) Spirituality; (6) Travel; (7) Monks and Monastery; (8) Christmas and Advent; (9) Social Justice and History; and (10) Irish Heritage.
In September 2026, I joined the half-a-million club when those weekly blog posts reached 500,000 total words. To celebrate and understand the moment a little better, I looked for a few reference points.
The authors/editors of the Bible might politely dismiss my feat. In English, the good book has roughly 750,000 to 800,000 words, depending on the translation and edition.
The longest novel ever published, according to Guinness World Records, is Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at seven volumes and 1.2 million words. He wrote it in fourteen years.
Leo Tolstoy took six years to write War and Peace, which has about 560,000 words. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote his epic 400,000 word novel The Brothers Karamazov in about two years.
The longest American novel is Madison Cooper’s Sironia, Texas published in 1952 after eleven years of work. Its one million words span 1,700 pages.
If you count self-published, experimental literature, the wordiness record is held by Marienbad My Love by Mark Leach, clocking in at a massive 10,710 pages and 17 million words.
With no disrespect intended for Mr. Leach, long is not always good.
Ernest Hemingway wrote the 27,000 words of The Old Man and the Sea in just eight weeks. The Stranger by Albert Camus has just 30,000 words, written over a two year period.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince—atjust over 15,000 words—in a few months. The Christmas Box, by Utah’s Richard Paul Evans and with under 14,000 words, took six weeks to compose.
I have read some, but not all of those books. I can’t say how any of those authors felt about the lengthiness or brevity of their work. But I am glad I made it to half a million words with my blog.
I’ve learned a lot along the way. It’s been fun and interesting. And writing every week has helped me write better and faster.
Pleased as I am with myself, however, I’ve got a ways to go.
Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, once advised, “Write a thousand words a day and in three years you’ll be a writer.” Add that all up and it’s 1,095,000 words!
At my current pace, that would require another half million words and about nine more years. I’d be 74. Seems a bit daunting, but worth trying.
The good news is that the words of another writer—no less than a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame—offer me a ray of hope and encouragement on this point. I sometimes hear those words on the radio, as do you.
His name is Jon Bon Jovi.
And I am quite grateful whenever he reminds me…“Whoa, we’re halfway there…”
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for a future fun Christmas read.
