For the sake of this thread, we’ll assume that the book has certain requirements; it has to be at least 100 pages long, the type must be in the usual range of point size (to dissuade smart-asses who might want to put one big word on each page or something like that) and it must comprise mostly of text, not illustration or photography. I’d try to make more specific requirements, but the point is to avoid people coming in and saying they could write a book in a half hour by taking an extremely minimalist approach. The goal here isn’t a contest to see who could write a book the quickest; the idea is to get a feel for how long a professional (or aspiring professional) writer would take to write a serviceable book (first draft).
My record – six months.
Though I once did 100 pages in a month.
My record: 90,000 word novel in six weeks from start to first edit. The one I am working on now will be the same length but probably take 3 months (halfway through but real life is getting in the way).
Realistically, especially if you do your own editing, it will take longer. Yes I have books published, although I don’t do it full time so I may not count as a professional author for purposes of your questionnaire.
Well, I did NaNoWriMo two years ago - a 50,000 word novel, in a month.
Not that it was good! No editing time. But I did crank one out.
Well, 100 pages isn’t a book. That’s only about 30,000 words.
You must have seen the many threads on NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. The goal for people who participate is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Each years, thousands succeed.
Professionals can churn out incredible numbers of words and have them published. In the pulp days, writers routinely produced a million words a year. Some managed a 40,000 word novel every week. Many now famous professionals wrote soft-core porn novels on the side to make money when they were young. Robert Silverberg did three per month at his peak and had his afternoons free to do his other work. Barry Malzberg boasted of writing a novel in 16 hours. Writers doing tie-in novels (like a novel timed to come out with the release of a movie) are often given less than a month to write.
Writing a novel a month is standard for many romance writers and writers of adventure series. I’m not sure if they do more than one draft, but they get published so presumably some polishing is required, at least reading it over and correcting typos.
Some writers are fast and prolific. Most successful genre writers depend on being fast and prolific or else they don’t have careers. Mainstream writers, to the contrary, are critically penalized if they appear to write too much. Look at Joyce Carol Oates or John Updike.
If you’re wondering about how long it should take you to write 100 pages, don’t. It will take you as long as it takes you. Every writer is different.
If I’d already “soaked” in the idea long enough – if it had enough simmering and back-braining time – four to five months for a 90,000 - 100,000 word novel.
The simmering time varies book to book.
Thanks for the replies; I’m currently working on two projects (meaning books I hope will be picked up for publication, as opposed to already having a deal) that are very different…one being a psychological horror novel and the other being a “how-to” book of sorts (on a very different topic than the first book!). I’m thinking the how-to book is going to go pretty quickly (couple months, maybe), but I find myself with a lot of stop and go with the novel. I had the first four chapters in one night, and about a month with nothing worth keeping. Ugh.
There are many, many variables, of course.
Working basically full-time (in between chemo treatments–interesting story there), I produced a 400-page technical book in just under four months, which included creating all of the charts, graphs, and illustrations, creating a comprehensive index, and doing some of the research (it was in a field I know well, so I had a lot of the research already at hand). Of course, the peer reviews, copyediting, proofing, cover design, and so forth took another nine months…
The first time I did a children’s book I thought it would be much faster than it was. The actual writing time wasn’t bad, but balancing the text to fit exactly in 48 pages, making sure pictures matched up with facing pages, arranging things so the text went on the page with the right picture, and so forth meant that 48 pages took several months, although not fulltime.
Probably the quickest “grownup” book I’ve done was about three months (including all research time and layout) for around 300 pages.
News organizations have published staff-written books about major events (e.g., moon landing, 9/11 attacks) within two weeks of the event.
The key there is that it was an organization, not an individual. In a case like that, there will be dozens of people working long shifts, with multiple writers, researchers, copyeditors, photographers, artists, proofreaders, designers, and others working flat-out.
Such a book can conceivably hit shelves in a very short period of time in these days of print-on-demand presses, but for a reasonably-priced offset print job on a good-size print run, it’s highly unusual to see less than six weeks from the time the layout is complete until the first full press run is shipped out.
A friend of mine recently did a book with University of Oklahoma Press. By the time they finished all of the peer reviews, fact-checking, and so forth, it took over a year and a half from the time he finished the manuscript until the book hit store shelves.
I wrote my one novel (a fluffy romance/comedy sorta thing) in eight weeks, and it was pretty short, a paperback of about 190 pages / 50K words. I was under the gun thanks to the publisher, which is probably the only way I could have squeezed it out so quickly.
My biggest problem as a writer is that I … don’t. The funny thing is that I also write an online serial, for which I’ve written as quickly as 15,000 words per week, but for me, finishing a novel was a much more confining, painful and organized process. The NaNo folks amaze and astound me. Managing to complete a work in so short a period of time impresses the hell out of me.
I’ve been working on my book for 22 years now. Still not even close to complete. Of course, it’s a memoir, so that has an effect on the speed, but still…
Two NaNos, and both times only about 20 days of actual writing, and a 175,000-word effort in about four and a bit months - late January until early June 2002.
I’ve never written a book, but I once met a man who did
I note some parallels here with Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky and his novel The Gambler.
Except for the fluffy romance/comedy sorta thing, of course. The author was originally given one year to write a new book for his publisher on pain of ceding all rights to his entire body of work for a decade. For reasons irrelevant to this thread, Dostoyevsky left this task to the last minute or, more accurately, the last month. He met his deadline with hours to spare.
The English translation by C J Hogarth comprises 155 pages with, I guess, about 70,000 words.
I’ve ghostwritten manuscripts of 60,000 words in one month. Of course, I thought it sucked, but I also didn’t care, as I was merely bringing another person’s ideas to the page.
I’ve been working on my no-longer-really-a-children’s-novel-on-account-of-all-the-war-&-rape since '03 and am one month, by my estimate from being done. By which I mean abandonng it.