It is the question every novelist fields more than any other, usually from someone you half-remember from school who has resurfaced on Facebook after decades of total silence. “Saw you write books now! How long does it take?” And there it sits, waiting, as though I might reply with a figure as tidy as a boiler service interval.
The truthful reply disappoints everyone. It depends. It depends on the book, the year, the writer, and the unpredictable nature of life. “It depends” makes for a rotten answer at the barber’s, though, so let me try to do better than that.
The honest answer most authors will give you
For a debut novelist holding down a full-time job, the figure people tend to land on runs somewhere between one and three years. Plenty of professionals who write for a living will turn a book around in six months or less. Plenty of brilliant ones take far longer because brilliant usually comes with a lot of soul-searching and editing.
The mechanics underneath that range are simpler than they sound. Most working novelists draft between 1,000 and 2,000 words a day, on the days the words actually come. Do the sums on an 80,000-word novel, and you arrive at a first draft inside two or three months of decent mornings. Which sounds lovely. It also bears roughly the same resemblance to real life as the photo on the box bears to the flat-pack wardrobe.
The messy middle nobody warns you about
The opening chapters are the worst in my experience. The analogy I’ve always returned to is that it’s akin to starting a petrol lawnmower in the spring after it’s spent six months festering in a cold, damp shed. There’s a lot of coughing, spluttering, and numerous failed attempts to get the bastard thing up and running. It’s the same with the opening chapters of a novel.
Eventually, though, you manage to get going. Momentum slowly builds as the characters come to life, and the words flow. Then you reach the middle.
The middle is where novels go to lie down in a darkened room. You know roughly where the story ends; you have entirely lost the thread of how it crawls there. It is the literary equivalent of walking into your own kitchen with great purpose and forgetting why, except the kitchen happens to be 40,000 words long and you have to live in it for three months. Somewhere in my desk sits a notebook containing the words “and then SOMETHING happens” underlined four separate times. It remains the single most honest note I have ever made about my own process.
This is the part that swallows the calendar. Not the typing. The standing in the shower at half six working out why your protagonist would never, in a thousand years, do the thing the plot urgently needs him to do on page 211.
The famous outliers, fast and slow
If the range above feels woolly, the famous names will not narrow it for you. They simply prove how wide the spectrum runs.
At the brisk end, Stephen King reckons a first draft of a novel should take no longer than a single season; in On Writing he sets himself a ceiling of about three months. At the other extreme stands J.R.R. Tolkien, who began The Lord of the Rings in December 1937 and did not finish the main narrative until the late 1940s, with revisions dragging the whole business well past a decade.
Then there is the simple matter of life refusing to cooperate. J.K. Rowling spent roughly six years on the first Harry Potter book while raising a daughter alone and teaching, which is a useful corrective for anyone imagining that talent comes with a faster clock. And Donna Tartt has built an entire career on patience, leaving something close to a decade between novels and writing the lot longhand, in pencil. The Goldfinch followed her previous novel by around eleven years. Eleven years.
So why does it actually take so long?
Because the first draft, the bit everyone pictures when they picture writing, is only the start. A novel passes through draft after draft before anyone but the author claps eyes on it. You write the thing to find out what it wants to be, then you write it again now that you know. There is structural surgery, then line-by-line tidying, then the read-through where you discover you named two characters Dave.
And the calendar does not pause for any of it.
Then, there’s the fact that life isn’t simple. Shit happens, as they say, and that shit can range from a house move to a two-day hangover. The writing time and the actual elapsed time are different animals entirely. A book might hold four months of real work spread thinly across two years of ordinary life happening on top of it.
And yet. Ask any novelist whether they would swap the slowness for a button that spat out a finished book in a weekend, and watch the hesitation. The months are the work. The wandering, the false starts, the notebook full of “SOMETHING happens” … that is the bit where the book quietly becomes good without telling you.
If only novels came with a do-over button
I spend my entire working life handing characters the one shortcut I will never have: a way back to the moment they fluffed it, with the chance to do the whole thing properly the second time. It is no coincidence, I suspect, that a man who rewrites the same chapters fourteen times keeps writing about people offered a redraft of their own lives.
In The ’86 Fix, Craig Pelling buys a can of Coke in 1986 and, decades later, stuck in a loveless marriage and a dead-end job, lands a single weekend back in his teenage years to fix the lot. In In Lieu of You, a husband on the wrong end of an ugly divorce takes a trip back to 1996 to stop himself ever meeting his wife, on the reasonable theory that no meeting means no marriage and no pain. Both men receive the redraft of real life I would dearly love on a manuscript. Neither finds it quite as simple as they hoped, which, if I am honest, also rings a bell.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to write a novel?
For most novelists, anywhere between one and three years, especially while holding down another job. Full-time professional writers often manage a book a year or quicker, while others happily take far longer. There is no single correct figure; it depends on the book, the writer and how much of life lands on top of the writing.
How long does it take to write a first draft?
At a typical pace of 1,000 to 2,000 words a day, an 80,000-word first draft can come together in roughly two to three months of consistent writing. In practice it usually takes longer, because few people write every single day and the middle of a novel tends to slow everything to a crawl.
Why does writing a novel take so long?
The first draft is only the beginning. A finished novel passes through multiple drafts of structural changes, rewrites and line edits before anyone else reads it. On top of that, most authors fit writing around jobs and family, so a year of real work can spread across two or three years of ordinary life.
How many words a day do authors write?
Many working novelists aim for between 1,000 and 2,000 words on a writing day, though this varies enormously. Stephen King famously targets around 2,000; plenty of others write far fewer and still finish their books. Daily word count matters less than turning up regularly over a long stretch.
What is the “messy middle” of a novel?
The messy middle is the stretch after the exciting opening and before the ending, where many writers lose momentum and clarity. You know roughly where the story is heading but not how to reach it, and this is usually the slowest, most rewritten part of the whole book.