When it comes to being a writer, there is no substitute for practice.

Yes, you can read "writing for dummies" or "authorship for complete idiots" and any number of books out there written to help you become a writer of quality prose. In the end, though, to become a writer, you need to write. In fact, it is said that only after having written a million words will a would-be writer begin to get the hang of it.

Just how many is a million words?

Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace is a little over half a million words. That's one long book. I've never met anyone who actually finished it. Just imagine how long it would take to type the whole thing into a word processor, never mind to write such a piece from scratch and refine it until it reaches publication quality.

The average romance novel, at four hundred pages, might have about 100,000 words. So, imagine writing ten of those. Heck, most people wouldn't read a million words in ten years, let alone write that many, but to become a writer, practice is the only way to get there. The same must be true of learning to play the violin, painting a portrait in oils or learning to speak Chinese like a native.

So, how many words have you written so far in your adult life? To get an idea of how many, paste a bunch of your favorite blog entries into a Word document and check the status bar to see the word count. Then divide that number into a million.

The average blog entry might be about two hundred words. When you've written five thousand of them you might begin to get the hang of it.