How long should it take to write a novel?

Jeffrey's answer

Longer than you think. Less long than you fear.

I write four two-hour shifts a day, six days a week, for eight or nine months. That is the first draft. Then the rewriting begins, and the rewriting is where the real work happens. I take every novel through fourteen drafts. Some have gone to eighteen. Adam & Eve, my final, took twenty years. By the end I have spent roughly nine to twelve months of intensive work on a manuscript. Across thirty novels and fifty years, that is the discipline that has produced more than 30 books, 95 short stories, 3 Prison diaries and more.

If you are writing your first novel, give yourself a year. Not a calendar year — a year of actual writing. Many first-time novelists write nothing for nine months and then write everything in a frantic three. The novel suffers, and so does the novelist. Spread the work. Make it daily. The athlete’s discipline matters more than the genius’s flash.

How fast can a good novel be written? Faster than you would believe. Georges Simenon wrote seventy-five Maigret novels in forty years — call it two a year, while writing a great deal else besides — and they are not bad novels. P.G. Wodehouse worked at the rate of perhaps a book a year for sixty years and remained one of the funniest writers in English to the end. The slow novelist is not always the better novelist. Donna Tartt has written three novels in thirty years. Each is exquisite. So is Decline and Fall, which Evelyn Waugh wrote in a few months.

The honest answer for most writers is this. The first draft tells you what the book is. The middle drafts make the story work. The final drafts make the prose work. Each phase needs unhurried attention. Cut any of them short and the book will know.

If you write four two-hour shifts a day, six days a week, you will write a novel inside a year. If you write thirty minutes when you can find them, you will write a novel inside five.

And then it could be a series of novels. The Clifton Chronicles took me seven years and seven books to tell. And that, too, was a single project

A few practical notes

• Realistic timeline for a serious first novel: 18 months to 3 years. Most debut novelists who finish take this long. Anyone claiming three months has either written a thin book or lied.
• First draft: 3–9 months at 500–1,000 words a day. Jeffrey does it in two months at 1,000 words a day across four shifts. Most writers do it in 6 months at one shift a day.
• Revision: usually as long as the first draft, often longer. Plan for 2–3 substantial revisions before submitting. Each takes 1–3 months.
• You don’t need to write every day to finish. 5 days a week is more sustainable than 7 — burnout kills more novels than slow weeks.
• Track word count, not hours. Hours-at-the-desk is a vanity metric. Words-on-the-page is the actual progress measure. A spreadsheet with daily word count is the cheapest accountability tool there is.

Don’t compare timelines. Lee Child writes a Reacher novel in 90 days. Donna Tartt takes 10 years. Both win. Your timeline is yours.