How long did it take you to write your book?

Discussion in 'General Writing' started by 33percent, Jul 6, 2015.

  1. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    Well the first took 9 months. :D Though it was my first committed work, that and I am new to writing something a bit longer than 33 pages. Hope the second will not take as long considering it is the follow up to the first. The best part so far has been the in the moment research, and utilizing a global map of Mars for technical and tactical reference. Pretty soon I will be using a global map of the Earth the same way. Pluto did not receive that much attention due to it's small size, but it didn't stop me from ruining the surface in the process of writing the story. :p
     
  2. RikWriter

    RikWriter Member

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    My first book took many years---somewhere around 8 years---to complete because I was involved with life at the time and only wrote sporadically. Since I've become serious about being a writer, books take me about a year to complete and get ready for publishing.
     
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  3. Writeorflight

    Writeorflight Active Member

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    When I was young (12-14) it took me 2 years to write a complete draft of my novel. Then I realized the whole idea was dumb and ill-executed, and quit writing it cold-turkey. So I spent another whole year and a half working very hard on another novel, only to realize that idea was also very dumb. It's been almost two years now and I'm working on a third "idea" but I'm sort of giving up hope. So a total of 5-ish years and no progress whatsoever. Keep at it, and don't give up! You've gotten so far already.
     
    Last edited: Jul 7, 2016
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  4. Miller0700

    Miller0700 Contributor Contributor

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    Two months, mainly because I had laid out what the book was about before hand and stuck to a schedule. It was 118 pages.
     
    Last edited: Aug 11, 2018
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  5. Spencer1990

    Spencer1990 Contributor Contributor

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    I started my first (only) novel, over year ago. In the span of a couple days I had written about seven thousand words. About a year or so went by, and i hadn't added a single word to it. Then I decided to pick it back up and wrote the first draft in just over a month. I'm not sure what changed, why I became inspired, or if it's any good. But I am happy with the production. I'm working on the editing process right now, and plan to get some beta readers by the end of this week.

    --Spencer
     
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  6. Laurin Kelly

    Laurin Kelly Contributor Contributor

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    It took me about a year to write the first drat of my novel. It started out at 147,000 words, but after one set of edits on my own and another set with my publisher's editor, it's down to a trim 93,000. So a year to write, but three years of work before it finally comes out!
     
  7. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    I actually loved editing, once I'd let my novel sit for a long time. Before that, I was just tinkering with word choices, sentences, etc, and getting very frustrated. More often than not, I ended up erasing what I'd done the day before and restoring the old version and starting again.

    However, once I'd let it sit (for several years, due to a few life changes) and got back to it, WOW. Suddenly I knew exactly what to do, and removing huge swaths of it was no longer painful. I love that kind of editing, because I know I'm getting somewhere, and that what I did 'today' made the story better than it was before.

    I don't think there is any prescribed length of time to write a novel. I suppose, once you become traditionally published, you will be expected to churn out books at a fairly regular rate. (I think that's why so many second and third books are actually inferior to the first.) But your time is your own for the first book, or if you plan to self-publish. I think it's more important to put out the best novel you can write. That means it might take a lot of time to create and polish it.

    I also think those of us (like @Lew,) who write historical novels, need a bit extra time to make sure our research is correct. We don't have the luxury of just making up whatever works for the story. We need to fit what works for the story into an actual historical timeline, complete with actual historical facts and details of life during the period. This takes a lot of time to get right, and it's difficult to hurry the process. Sometimes it takes ages for a tidbit of information that you really NEED to surface.
     
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  8. Brindy

    Brindy Senior Member

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    I took 12 months of writing, about 2 chapters a month-ish, but did have a 12 month break towards the end to deal with a divorce and house move, not exactly easy to have creative moments with that going on. Since then I have spent 6 months editing and waiting for beta readers comments. The last of those arrived in yesterday's post, so a few more days checking their comments and I am going to consider it done. The next step will be to format it, to ensure it's the same throughout.
     
  9. mrieder79

    mrieder79 Probably not a ground squirrel Contributor

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    First draft was 1 year. Polishing and such about 1.5 years.
     
  10. Desertphile

    Desertphile Member

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    My first book: 100,717 words. 25 months, which comes to 0.19 of a word per minute. But then, I'm a cowboy, not a writer.
     
  11. Denegroth

    Denegroth Banned

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    4 finished pages a day...say an eight-hour day + time for prep and research (2 weeks to 2 months)
     
  12. EnginEsq

    EnginEsq Member

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    It takes your entire life, up to the point your done with it, to write your first book. All that experience, all that imagining, it all contributes. That's why some authors only have one good book in them.

    How long between putting down the first word and and the last is a different question, of course.
     
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  13. TWErvin2

    TWErvin2 Contributor Contributor

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    My most recent novel, soon to be released took about 10 months.
     
  14. TMK

    TMK New Member

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    Not done yet. But currently sitting on 1 year and 9 months, but that's just planning and about a page extract done
     
  15. Desertphile

    Desertphile Member

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    That was well-said. :) I wrote the same thing in the introduction to my memoir: "There is much brutal effort in writing a memoir: one must first live a few decades."
     
  16. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    I'm about 80k words into my first novel* , I've been writing it since the middle of august so about 3 months - the target is completed "shitty first draft by xmas. (though as engine says the life experience that goes into takes me back 20 plus years , while the actual research phase took about a year prior to starting writing)

    (*that's if we don't include the really crap rip off of watershipdown I wrote for my sister when I was 8 and she was 3 - as i recall that was a couple of thousand words and took about a week - all written and illustrated by hand though ( I believe she still has it somewhere) )
     
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  17. Tesoro

    Tesoro Contributor Contributor

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    Renewing: I have completely switched genres with my current one and so far I'm at 8 months, from first draft to my third round of rewriting and editing. Not ready yet though. I estimate that it'll take me at least a year in total. But who really knows? :eek:
     
  18. pitviper

    pitviper Member

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    As per Stephen King: it should not take more than a weekend to write a short story, or more than a long holiday (ie, a week, or nine days) to write a novel. Clean it up later, but it should be WRITTEN within that timeframe.
     
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  19. NiallRoach

    NiallRoach Contributor Contributor

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    And how many novels has Stephen King written? I think sheer volume of practice does an awful lot for this timescales, and that's with ignoring the whole architects/gardeners debate, and the fact that King's word isn't gospel.
     
  20. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    Stephen King said you should be able to write a novel in 9 days? Where'd he say that? Was there context? Like, maybe the outline of a novel or something?
     
  21. pitviper

    pitviper Member

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    Nah, it was in his book about writing (I think it was called "On Writing"). He was a teacher, with three small children at home. His wife Tabatha worked at Dunkin Donuts. I believe he wrote his first published novel (Salem's Lot? or Carrie. Can't remember) over an Easter break, while watching the kids. He wrote "The Running Man" (a novella) over one weekend.
     
  22. SadStories

    SadStories Active Member

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    I'm pretty sure Stephen King said usually 3 months for the first draft because early parts get a foreign feel after a while and you lose the whole or something like that. Not everyone writes this way though. Donna Tartt regularly takes 10 years per book. In fact, Stephen King is infamous for how much he writes quickly. It arguably shows too, as he varies a lot in quality.

    I've been writing without any system to it since I was a child, not finishing much and nothing of worth. About 4 years ago I got serious and wrote two incomplete drafts of a 120,000-ish first volume of a Cloud Atlas-like series with lots of smaller stories intersecting. It was really complex, experimental and I also had no idea what I was doing. I kept skipping parts that I just didn't have any idea how I would do. I ended up turning it all into a 30,000-40,000 word demo tape of some sorts and sent it to a publisher that sometimes does shorter, artistic works -- even though my book was heavy on genre fiction. It was kind of desperate, but I was hoping they would see my potential and help me out. No such luck. Later I've felt kind of shameful about this "book" because I feel like it was a really cheap thing to try to sell. All this took like 2 years.

    Since this failure I spent about 14 months on the first volume out of five of some kind of philosophical, coming-of-age slipstream deconstruction of Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey which ended up at like 170,000 words. Honestly it's hard for me to say how many drafts it was. Some parts I rewrote like 20 times, others only once or twice -- and this was done without any order or regularity. I sent it to two publishers, none of which were interested. Even while I was waiting for their response though I felt like it was kind of undeserving. I think the first quarter has some major "show, don't tell" problems due to my lack of knowledge when I started, and the rest of the book could use a lot more work too ... Currently I've decided not to try to send it more places, but just let it rest while I complete another book. After the vampire book I spent like a month writing two and a half short stories, all of which I feel need more polish. Now I'm writing a historical gothic hard sci-fi fantasy time-travelling tragic lesbian romance which is also some kind of fairy tale parable about futility. I'm at around 30,000 words and expect it to be 80,000-100,000 at the end. Again I'm not sure how to count the drafts, but I've written through everything that is in there so far at least twice. At my current pace and with the amount of spare time I have it will actually be done in February, after less than 3 months.

    In sum, it's hard for me to say how long it takes for me to write a book as I'm not even sure I've ever written a book. I've never laid the final punctuation, feeling like I'll never want to change anything, and I've never been published. On the other hand, as I'm developing, I feel like I might turn into a super fast writer. I'll probably turn lazy if I get the chance though, like GRRM.^^
     
    Last edited: Dec 26, 2016
  23. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    Yeah, I've heard the "it should take a season to write a first draft" thing from Stephen King before. That makes a lot more sense to me than writing a novel in nine days - if he was doing that, he'd be coming out with a lot more than a book a year, surely...

    And, of course, he's not too worried about his day job anymore, so if it takes him a year to finish a book when he has the luxury of working on it full time, other writers shouldn't be too worried about taking that long or longer.
     
  24. pitviper

    pitviper Member

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    Well, King has 56 novels (both successful & not-so) under his belt. Personally, I prefer Peter Straub (nine novels) & also Joe Hill (King's son; three novels- entire life). King's an aberration, but also... an inspiration. If we all wrote like him, OMG, how much richer the world would be. Let's just throw it all out there: the good, the bad, the ugly. F@c$ criticism. Who cares? They're the ones writing critiques, for a salary.... not writing novels.
     
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  25. NiallRoach

    NiallRoach Contributor Contributor

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    Happily ignoring the people who rely on publishing good books for their salaries, are we? Because, you know, who's going to buy trash?
    Of course, there's always selfpublishing, but then all you're doing is pushing the rejection back a step if the novel's shite.
     
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