How long did it take you to write your first novel?

2 years to write, one year to beat into shape.

A year to write. Two years to get into shape...find an agent.

Started on 12/7, went to Italy on 12/14 for 2 weeks, not putting any work on it. Got back New Year's. I'm currently 14k in for about 14 days work.

Pretty proud of myself but I want to do better, there are just too many distractions. I'm hoping to have the first draft done by the end of the month, which should be around 45k.

My final draft will be around 70k or so, the first few chapters entirely too light.

A book usually takes me between a few months to a year to complete, depending on how motivated I am, and how much time I have free.

That's a tricky question... the idea for my first novel was over a year ago, but the writing was easy once I got motivated.

The actual time it took me to complete 200,000 words was right around 2 1/2 months, but the actual time from inception to final manuscript was probably a year and two months.

You can bang out a book in no time, if the story speaks to you, but the constant revising is the true testament to your willpower as an author.

My first novel I wrote out in longhand--and my handwriting is so poor even I can't read it--and that took me about a year. Did it at night, between teaching classes--whenever I had free time. Setting it out on a computer took about six months, as I had to go back and forth between coffee-stained pages and my old computer which froze up constantly. It got published about eight months later, lucky me.

I keep my novels between 60-70000 words now, so they flow much faster and get to the heart of the matter earlier on. I can usually get something decent done within a month, but as someone said before, it's a test of willpower and (my words) talent to edit it into the masterpiece you want it to be.

Under two months when I was in high school, 120k words. But I was in high school I had plenty of time haha.

If I count my first attempt at a novel (it was 13,000 words long, and I was 14 so not exactly good at writing) it took probably a month, with most of it getting done in my two week school holiday.

The first real novel I wrote, aged 16, I started during my GCSEs in May and finished the 1st draft in November. For some reason, every book I actually finish (i.e. not the ones I give up on) always start in May. Usually, during study leave for exams....

I think it took me about a year once I focused on it, but I had been kicking around the idea and had written maybe 40 pages before I got rolling. But I'm probably going to edit it again (a few years later) so maybe it is still not done! I learned many lessons from the process and my second novel (Dead, in my signature) took much shorter.

A month to think about the whole plot and characters. Two months for the first draft. Two months and a half editing. I need to work fast.

msd said:

I am working on my first novel and to make things more challenging, English is not my first language. I am writing part time and only on the weekends. I am almost 60,000 words into my first draft; I think it will be about 90,000 words when I am done.

At this rate I feel it will take me about 4 years to complete. Is this normal?

How long did it take you to write your first novel?

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My first, second, third, and fourth novel took me about 3 months--however none of them are published and the first two are trunked. The third will be picked apart and revised and the fourth is waiting to be revised because I'm working on my one [epically long] novel, which is going on 5 years of work now.

I think the first one took about...2 or 3 months, maybe? It wasn't a real novel though, more like a novella. I just went back and read a chapter (the whole thing's on my blog). It's terrible.

15 months, but I wasn't writing regularly and I was switching between two projects.

As ever, there is no set amount of time. It's just once your published people might expect you to deliver at least a book a year.

The first "real" novel took a few years. I'm not sure I ever finished. I don't remember the confrontation with the Bad Guy. I'm also not sure i have a copy it. It was partly hand written. Partly typed up on a 286 & printed on a dot matrix printer.

The first one I ever finished to the point of submitting has files dates from 2000 to 2007. I kept going back to it while working on other things.

Novels are never finished. They're just put aside until later. (Even published books are often rewritten when a later edition comes out.)

I should be finished by June/July- that will make it 4 years writing full time. Wow, has it been that long already. When I started I was convinced it would take no longer than 6 months. That's a laugh...

My first novel, I started in early 2005 and it took perhaps six years to finish. My second novel, I knew a lot more about writing, so it only took about seven months to write, plus another year to revise. My other novels are still in-progress. My problem is, I write in spurts. I'll go months without working on any of my novels, then I'll get in the mood and write 50,000 words in a matter of weeks. It makes it hard to be consistent.

About two and a half years, including the rewrites and the edits and the planning stages. Unfortunately, I changed a lot during those two and a half years - I started in the middle of my senior year of high school and ended shortly after leaving university - so I ended up not liking it, but I wanted to have something complete so I pushed through it and now it sits quietly in a folder on my desktop, untouched.

First draft: 7 days. That's right. Days.


Revising: I don't think I'm going to waste my time because I don't think anything that was written in such a short amount of time would be salvageable or even worth working on polishing. Moreover I'm afraid to tell my beta that the first draft took seven days to write, 98,000 words. They'd be like and then when reading it they'd be like

28 days when I was 16 or so. I finished the entire thing, but it was really bad, haha. Read like a video game, complete with a racing competition on hoverbikes. I've since cannibalized it for parts.

My first took me six months, but was never published.

My first published novel had been underway for aprox 10 years with countless revisions.

Now it takes 6-12 months for each - more if Stuff in the Real World happens.

WormHeart

almost done my first novel - it's been about 15 months... definitely doesn't feel like that long, though

writing it out longhand since it really started as a short story that kept branching out and developing itself almost faster than i could write it

after writing about 100pgs longhand, i started typing it on my computer - typing what i had already written, editing, rewriting until i ran out of what i'd written and went back to continuing the story

so i've been writing and editing/rewriting my novel concurrently. i think it helps?