Those of you that have written novel--how long, from the moment you began typing the prose (not making plot notes), did it take you to complete it?
Posted by TamesonYip (Member # 9072) on :
Well, I wrote the words "The End" within one month. The editing though...I am on 6 months now and just now started a chapter exchange.
Posted by Meredith (Member # 8368) on :
Define complete.
The answer varies. I wrote the first draft of BLOOD WILL TELL in about three and half weeks. What a roller coaster ride that was. I'd say four months for a first draft is more common. DREAMER'S ROSE fought me hard and took longer. SEVEN STARS fought me to a standstill.
But those are just the first drafts. Then there's the second draft, getting readers, making more revisions, a polishing pass through. At least.
Posted by MartinV (Member # 5512) on :
The novel that I published (not in English) took me exactly 365 days. No joke.
Posted by Kitti (Member # 7277) on :
Varies. I have some that I've written in less than a month and some that have taken 10 years (and countless rewrites).
Posted by Dark Warrior (Member # 8822) on :
My girlfriends son (7yo) wrote a two page novel this weekend (15 words) in 8 minutes. The end of the story read "DN". I had no idea what that meant until he read it to me and pronounced 'DN' suspiciously like 'The End'
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
The quickest, in about a week...the longest, in about four or five years...this applies only to finished works.
There's also the "arc of my life" to consider...that quickest one, and most of the other ones, was written when I was young, full of energy, and unoccupied with earning a living, back in the early eighties. In those days I had lots ot time on my hands and could work on something. The last one was from the late nineties, where I had a soul-draining job---well, a long and tiring job---and could only devote short periods of time to writing.
(I say finished---for a full year in the 2000s, I worked on a thing that ran one hundred thousand words, but was completely unfinished when I abandoned it. I even abandoned it on the anniversary of the day I started it...)
Posted by BenM (Member # 8329) on :
You know, it's a good topic, because when I'm feeling like the next project is insurmountable, I look back at the first novel draft I wrote and think: I did that in six weeks.
Posted by Tiergan (Member # 7852) on :
My first novel "Curse of the Gods" took 18 months, but I had never written before, and that including 2 3month breaks. My 2nd novel "Destiny's Blade" took 6 months. And my 3rd "Knights Valor" took 3 months, of which I kept a journal and wrote only on 60 days of those 90.
Posted by Teraen (Member # 8612) on :
"My" only finished work was around 120K words, and it was co-authored with a friend as we exchanged emails back and forth over the course of a year. Another 6 months or so was spent on revisionifying it. This was while both of us were full time college students, so I am pretty sure we could have done the same thing in about 2-3 months with full effort...
Posted by Rhaythe (Member # 7857) on :
I started "Wilde Card" on November 1 last year for Nanowrimo. I wrote "THE END" on December 12th at 72 thousand words. I submitted the full manuscript to an agent for review just last week.
It doesn't feel like it took that long.
Posted by Owasm (Member # 8501) on :
My record is my NaNo novel. Start to finish: 20 days for 105,000 words. I did have an outline and a world built prior to the start.
mmm. I don't think it's garbage.
[This message has been edited by Owasm (edited May 24, 2010).]
Posted by rstegman (Member # 3233) on :
I wrote a 400 page novel rough draft in a year and a half.
Posted by tchernabyelo (Member # 2651) on :
I think my one completed novel took something around 7 years from first written lines to the 200,000-word first draft. I was by no means working on it exclusively.
There are some astonishingly fast writers here - Robert, you really wrote a novel in a <i>week</i>? I don't even think I could phsically do that - I've never written more than 12k in a day and that was an effort that left me shattered and unable to write for two or three days afterwards. Realistically, 4-5k a day seems to be about my limit, so a 120k novel would take an absolute minimum of 24 days, if I had nothing else to distract me and was able to resolve all the issues that arose during writing... in practice, I doubt I'll ever finish a novel inside 6 months.
Posted by XD3V0NX on :
Okay, let me think: Eye of a Shadow, which some may know is riding 209k, took me roughly four months...the first draft. Hm. Well, you said from the first moment I started the prose, though. That's a whole nother story. When I started EOAS, I had no knowledge of knowing how to write what-so-ever, and I would write maybe a page here and a page there....So, from February 2009 to....the end of April 2009, I only got maybe 60 - 80 pages done. It wasn't until I started looking up on writing and got a book called "Book in a Month" that I started writing as fast as I possibly can. Beginning early May, that was when I really started pushing myself faster. I finished it August 24th, the day before school started. So, technically speaking, I finished it in 7 months. But if I got rid of those 80 pages that took me forever to write, then probably about 3 to 4, maybe 5 months.
My new project, Jealousy Kills, originally started out as a novella, but then I had to re write it because it was told from a "not likeable" characters POV and it wasn't very hooking. From there, when I started this sometime in late April, I decided to make it into a book (60k...70k, maybe). I think I'll finish this first draft by the end of June.
Posted by TrishaH24 (Member # 8673) on :
About a year for my first book...that was a really crappy year. Two months for my 100k high fantasy. Three weeks for my 50k YA urban fantasy. But technically I never "finish" anything because I'm always tweaking something here or changing something there.
Posted by MAP (Member # 8631) on :
I am a really slow writer. I haven't kept track of how long it has taken me to write a novel, but I know it was more than a year and less than two.
Posted by genevive42 (Member # 8714) on :
Years and years as a fun side project, until I figured out that I should take this seriously.
Posted by InarticulateBabbler (Member # 4849) on :
4 months for a first draft (approximately). I'm still not finished with the editing passes.
Posted by Pyre Dynasty (Member # 1947) on :
I've got one that took me ten years.
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
Oh, if we add stuff that we never finished but still intend to, I've got a couple or three lengthy MSS novel attempts from over thirty years ago, plus a couple more scattered from then till now...
Posted by axeminister (Member # 8991) on :
I started writing for Lent. Finished in December. So, around 9 months. Finished around 100k Pretty good while working 45 hours a week.
Axe
Posted by SteveR (Member # 9128) on :
I finished a 65,000 word novel in a month for the Nanowrimo event several years back. It came out about like one would suspect. Not good, not awful.
My wife and I recently finished our sixth revision of an epic fantasy. At a slim 180,000 words it's at our agent now. This one took six years, which averages out to a rewrite per year. This last version was a near total rewrite - we finally bit the bullet and did what we should have done in the first place rather than trying to save all that golden prose from earlier drafts. It took a little over a year with both of us working on it part time, and is much improved.
Posted by WouldBe (Member # 5682) on :
I wrote a YA/historical so long ago that I can't remember how long it took to write, a year at least, on and off. It was an early attempt at writing. It is so old that I had find an ancient DOS Word Perfect, and a computer to run it on, and then remember a twenty-year-old password. I have no idea why I pw-protected it. That prevented me from importing it into a recent word processor until I recalled the pw.
I think it qualifies as a digital-trunk novel. I'm reworking it, and it seems now my best bet for a novel sale.
Posted by shimiqua (Member # 7760) on :
I've heard that if you write a page a day, you will finish a novel in a year.
The editing though...I am on 6 months now and just now started a chapter exchange.