I’m probably one of the few people who’s read, much less liked, Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Norman Mailer. I can’t find the cite, but he supposedly wrote it in a matter of days.
From time to time I’ve run across accounts that, in order to cover debts, Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” between the middle of October to the middle of November, 1843 so it could get published in time for that years Christmas season.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic novel The Gambler (1866) was written in less than one month.
The author owed his publisher a new book. If Dostoyevsky failed to produce the goods within the agreed timescale, the publisher would be awarded copywright to the author’s entire body of work.
I don’t know the full circumstances surrounding this arrangement but I do know that Dostoyevsky was an inveterate gambler himself. It’s likely that he was short of cash and was thus forced into making this disadvantageous pact to relieve his financial situation.
This is only an indirect answer to the OP, but it may help.
I write for fun. (Not for publication – then it would stop being fun.)
I have sprawling interlinked novels going back twenty years. Millions
of words. The first three or four million were in longhand; then I
discovered the computer.
You could call me a pulp fictioner. Nothing I write has any aesthetic
value and none of it’s meant to be deep. So I’ve no idea how long it
takes to write a quality novel. Or anything with greatness.
It takes me an hour to write twenty-five hundred words on the computer.
Two thousand if I’m getting stuck; twenty-seven or twenty-eight hundred
if it’s flowing. Three thousand always runs over an hour, which can be
a problem in the morning when it’s really time to leave for work.
The best weekends are the ones where the words and ideas are really
flowing, and I have to put on carpal tunnel preventers to keep my
forearms from knotting up, and on Sunday night my husband doesn’t know
if I’m still alive. I write ten thousand words on a weekend like that.
Once, long ago, I wrote twenty. It was marvelous.
I learned on the Dope (some thread, somewhere) that many booksellers
consider a novel to be about ninety thousand words. A novel??!! That’s
a chapter for me! It usually takes me four or five weeks to write a
chapter of 90-100,000 words. The reason it takes so long is I have to
go to work. I also have to take aikido, walk the dog, exercise, eat,
and see my husband. I get frustrated and edgy if ideas percolate too
long without being written out; that gets into a vicious cycle where I
can’t write them down because they’re getting too old. The best thing
is to do 2500 words a morning, every morning, and sometimes 3000 the
same night. Hope for six or eight or ten on the weekend.
Could I write a novel in three weeks? Yes. Could I write 25,000 words
in 10 days? Yes, doing only an hour every morning. Could I write
100,000 words in 10 days? If my forearms didn’t wear out, and nobody
made me go to work, and my husband did the laundry, and the dog walks
were short… absolutely.
Would they be great fiction? Hell no. I have no idea how much longer
greatness takes than the sort of pulp I spin out; I can’t even see
myself aspiring to the level of great pulp fictioners like Edgar Rice
Burroughs, who was said to be no slouch in the speed department. But is
it possible for such a cataract of words to be written in that time
frame? Absolutely.
In two or three days? Absolutely not. That’s my humble opinion, and I –
Oh, drat, wrong forum.
Gabriela; 7 min 11 seconds for the above 475 words
God, I apologize for the line wrap. That’s what I get for writing it on Word at work and sending it home via Yahoo. Sorry, Dopers.