The First Hundred Words

Writers write. There is an unstoppable flood of words and lyrics, rhyme and reason that pours out of them in some way. They may write in the form of letters, e-mail, journals, blogs, articles, or a variety of other outlets. A writer is like a fish out of water without some instrument with which to capture the siren's call. Writers write, good or bad, but seldom do writers complete that monumental achievement of completing "The Book." Many of the best writers in history were informed that they were not good writers, and like great vocalists, some writers have a magical world in which they captivate their audiences, a portal to their unique way of using the ordinary bricks and mortar of writing and building something magnificent. Writers write because they love to write, and whether a publisher stands ready to shower the world with your words or not, there is something to be said for achieving a completed product.

This started at age nine for me when I received my first journal, I suppose, or perhaps at age three when I wrote in crayons on the back of the door, "The Agly Daklin." I loved to write, and I didn't care what anyone else thought about what I wrote. Nearly twenty years went by as I started book after book after book. It was more thrilling for me to write a book, more thrilling to create than to read. One day I found an solution, a means by which to push myself to the next level. It was a challenge. The hundred word challenge. I had a colleague at work with whom I was reasonably competitive, and while we had very differing opinions and views, I realized that the competitive nature of our association made me want to work harder and drive myself to keep up, to keep ahead. I approached this friend with the chalenge: The hundred word challenge, and suddenly, the race started. We raced off on our individual paths, working independently and whole heartedly. Certainly, it was a race of the best kind: a race to complete the first three chapters of a book.

The math made it rather easy, really. A book contains anywhere between 75,000 and 120,000 words. In order to have a literary agent examine your work, you must have completed at least the first three chapters of a book. Three chapters consisted of approximately 5000 words each, so just to be considered, to be taken seriously, you had to have at least 15,000 words before approaching a literary agent. I challenged my colleague to three completed chapters by the end of the year. It was the end of June. Immediately we threw out December because that would be swamped with holiday festivities. We broke that down to 3000 words per month, and finally, with the realization that with an average of thirty days per month, this simply meant a measly hundred words per day.

Next we examined an average e-mail. I pulled up one that my colleague recently drafted, and ran a word count on it. 529 words. That was almost a week's worth of writing! It was thrilling to realize that this was almost laughably do-able. 100 words per day, and individually, we could be prepared before the end of the year to submit a partially completed literary work to an agent.

The first day I received a response from my colleague, describing the sheer... Want to read more of this book? Vote below to see this come to life...