How Long Does It Take to Write a Novel?
Quick answer: How long it takes to write a novel: honest ranges from six months to several years, famous fast and slow examples, and how to estimate your own timeline.
Writing a novel typically takes one to three years from first idea to submission-ready manuscript, working part-time. The first draft alone commonly takes four months to a year at a sustainable pace of 300 to 1,000 words per session, and revision usually takes as long again. Outliers are real in both directions: novels have been drafted in six weeks and gestated for eleven years, and both kinds have won major prizes.
The range matters more than any single number, because the question usually hides a different one: am I too slow? Almost certainly not. Novel-writing time is governed by three variables you can actually manage, weekly hours, drafting speed and revision depth, and estimating from those beats comparing yourself to legends.
The longer answer: do the arithmetic, not the mythology
A typical debut novel runs 80,000 to 100,000 words. At 500 words per session and four sessions a week, that is 2,000 words weekly, so a first draft lands in roughly ten to twelve months. Double the sessions, or the pace, and it halves. This is the entire mystery of 'how long': it is your weekly word count divided into your target length, plus the part nobody budgets, revision, which for most novelists takes as long as drafting and sometimes twice as long.
Revision resists arithmetic because it is diagnostic work: structural passes, where chapters die and characters merge; scene-level passes; line passes; then feedback rounds with readers, each requiring cooling time. A workable rule of thumb for a first novel is: however long the draft took, budget the same again before you call it done, and consider yourself lucky if you finish early.
One honest complication: first novels usually take longest, because you are building the writer while building the book. Second novels are frequently faster, sometimes brutally slower under expectation, but by the third book most novelists know their personal cycle, and it tends to hold steady for a career.
Famous clocks, fast and slow
The fast list is genuinely fast. William Faulkner claimed to have written As I Lay Dying in about six weeks of night shifts at a power plant, changing little afterwards. Kazuo Ishiguro drafted the core of The Remains of the Day in a planned four-week immersion, after months of preparation. John Boyne has said The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was drafted in a matter of days. Stephen King recommends a season: he advises finishing a draft in about three months so the story stays alive in the mind.
The slow list is just as distinguished. Donna Tartt publishes roughly every ten years, and The Goldfinch took about that long. J. R. R. Tolkien spent over a decade on The Lord of the Rings. Junot Diaz took eleven years over The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Harper Lee worked for years on To Kill a Mockingbird with heavy editorial help. The moral is not that either camp is right; it is that speed correlates with method and temperament, not with quality. Sprinting suits writers who plan or who revise heavily afterwards; marathoning suits writers who revise as they go.
Estimating and protecting your own timeline
Build your estimate from a two-week experiment: write four or five sessions, note your average words per session, and note how many sessions your week genuinely yields, not the fantasy number. Multiply out to a draft date, then double the total for revision. Now you have a personal answer to the title question, and it will be more accurate than anything a famous writer's anecdote can offer.
Protect the timeline with streaks rather than heroics. Daily or near-daily contact with the manuscript, even twenty minutes, keeps the story's machinery warm and eliminates the expensive re-entry cost of long gaps; most abandoned novels die during gaps, not at desks. Momentum tricks help: end sessions mid-scene so tomorrow starts easy, and keep a running note of what happens next.
It also pays to keep short fiction alive alongside the novel. Stories finish, and finishing feeds morale that a two-year project cannot supply on its own; a monthly contest rhythm, like Writory's story contest with its 2,000-word ceiling, gives novelists small, complete victories between the long haul's mile markers.
Common mistakes about novel time
The first mistake is treating NaNoWriMo maths as normal. Drafting 50,000 words in a month is a genuine achievement and a real method for some, but it produces a short, rough draft that then needs the year everyone thought they had skipped. Use sprints knowingly, not as a standard you are failing.
The second is announcing deadlines publicly before you know your rate; the third is confusing time spent with progress made, since ten hours of rereading chapter one is not ten hours of novel-writing. The fourth is quitting at the eighteen-month mark because 'it should be done by now'. It should not, particularly for a first novel; the median experience among published debuts is measured in years, frequently including a drawer novel before the one that sold. Slow is normal. Stopped is the only real failure state, and even stopped is often just paused.
What poets can take from this
- Measure your real words per week for a fortnight, then estimate from data.
- Budget revision as equal to drafting time, minimum.
- Touch the manuscript most days; gaps kill more novels than difficulty does.
- End sessions mid-scene to make the next start frictionless.
- Use sprints deliberately and cost in the revision they defer.
- Finish short pieces alongside the novel to keep morale fed.
Try it yourself
Write the opening chapter of a novel you would need years to finish, then write the 500-word synopsis of everything that follows, dated as if you finished it three years from now. Notice which parts of the synopsis you already know.
Questions
How long did famous novels take to write?
The spread is enormous: As I Lay Dying reportedly took Faulkner about six weeks, A Clockwork Orange took Anthony Burgess around three weeks by his own account, while The Goldfinch took Donna Tartt roughly a decade and The Lord of the Rings took Tolkien over twelve years. Method and life circumstances, not talent, explain most of the variance.
How long should a first novel be?
Most adult fiction debuts land between 70,000 and 100,000 words, with genre-specific norms: crime around 80,000 to 90,000, epic fantasy allowed up to 120,000, young adult 50,000 to 80,000. Staying near the norm removes one easy reason for rejection.
Is it normal to take five years to write a novel?
Entirely. Surveys of published authors regularly show multi-year timelines, especially for debuts written around jobs and families. Five years of steady progress is a working novelist's pace; the only worrying version is five years with no pages.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.