Exercising your writing muscles

After the excesses of Christmas, what we all need is exercise to work off those extra pounds.  Writers need exercise too.

I read somewhere that you need to write around a million words before you really know the craft of writing.  I'm approaching the two million mark now, so I guess I can call myself a proper writer.

What producing that amount of words does is give us lots of opportunities to work at grabbing openings, sparkling dialogue, and creating rounded characters.  We get lots of exercise for our writing muscles.

It's amazing how many people still think anyone can sit down and instantly become a good writer.  But, like learning a musical instrument, writing has to be learned too.  Yes, you do need that grammar and punctuation you learned in school, but your writing muscles need much more exercise than that.

We need to practise starting our stories in the right place, keeping the pace up, making our main characters into three-dimensional people.  And how do we do that?  We practice.  We exercise our writing muscles.