Newbie Hello!

[iamshaylen]

I'm new to absolutewrite, but definitely not to novel writing. I've been an aspiring novelist since I was eight. Thus far I've completed three, two that I'd seriously consider publishing. The first of which is sitting on a shelf currently. It's >260,000 words. A daunting edit.

The second is a modest 80,000 words. I completed it in April but have been editing/revising it ever since. To say I still have my faculties in tact is wishful thinking at this stage. No matter, I've officially honed the bones, organs, and muscles of the piece and am finally at the skin. YAY!

That said, I do have my query, synopsis, SASE envelops, and agent lists & cover letters all ready to go. And I recently had a short story accepted for publishing with an online literary magazine! So at the very least, it's been a nice deviation from editing!

What's the longest length of time you've spent editing a given novel? What's the shortest?

[Horseshoes]

Howdy, welcome and nice to meet ya.
If you look around and read, read, read here, I'll bet you'll be ahead of the game. If you're about to go on submission for the first time, you have the weeks to wait, making sure you're really ready. There are forums here to fact check, grammar check, introduce yourself, gripe, research agents, etc. Great forum, eh?

To answer your question, shortest four or five months, longest well over two years for me. However, I edit while writing the original so those time frames start from page one of the first draft, as I'm never not editing. (I cannot make myself push the first draft without editing as I go like some writers can. And I still have serious line editing and revision to do when I have a readable draft done.)

[Azraelsbane]

Welcome to AW. You have awesome taste in authors. Murakami is one of my favs, as well as Atwood. :)

For me, seven years of banging my head against an editing wall with my first novel, though I've shelved it, because it's never going to be publishable. My second novel, it's been about a month and a half and it's about to undergo final revisions.

[Zoombie]

Novels are much like apples. Some of them, you can peel and they'll be tasty and yummy. Other apples, no matter how much you love them, will only be all gross on the inside.

You get me? Probably not. Listen, I wrote six novels before I reached one that I thought was good enough. And even that one, I deleted and re-wrote it completely. Completely! I kept the characters, but they said different things and did slightly different things and everything was described better.

Hurra!

And, on another hand, welcome to Absolute Write! Everyone here is really helpful and friendly...except for that Zoombie feller. He's a crazy one, you should look out for him. He might say something one moment, only to say the same thing again for some reason. Also, he's got a giant diving suit for a father figure, what the heck is that all about? Reminds me of a time I shot down the Red Baron, ramble ramble ramble ...

[johnzakour]

What's the longest length of time you've spent editing a given novel? What's the shortest?

I still edit my novels that were published in the early 2000s whenever I read them.

For a more helpful answer, the amount of time spent editing a novel is irrelevant, you keep editing until one of two things happens:

1) you sell the novel
2) you give up on the novel after it's been rejected by everybody in the world