booker41

What's the average length of time for writing a novel? It's taken me two weeks, just to write a couple of paragraphs. Is that unsually slow lol.

chimchimski

Oh heavens no,

It can take many writers years to finish a novel. I've worked two years on my current story. With all of the research and just getting the time to write can be a long journey.
The length of time varies from one writer to the next, just hang in there and keep those words flowing.

Good Luck to You.

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~Robin~


~Chimmy Has A Brand New Bag~

Sam Winchester

I actually think it is slow, but it depends on whether you're talking about 'completely, proof-read, all mistakes edited, ready to be dispatched to an editor' finished, or 'almost, so that I can put it aside for a while and edit it later' finished. I usually take about a year for the latter. The former, as Chim said, can take years.

Sam.

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BOURBON

OMG what was I thinking? A first draft in six months? Do you know what I did today instead of writing....designed a schedule for completing said draft by summer. How sad. Still, it looks pretty....and I'm already behind....which means guilt... which means more prevarication...then more guilt...excellent! Feels like old times already. Choccie biccy anyone?

lemonavenue

As the NaNo WriMo contest shows, it is possible to write a first draft of 50,000 words or more in under a month. Some people--God help them--manage to cap 50,000 words in the first week. Some claim to do it in the first day and spend the rest of the month climbing to 100,000 or even 200,000 words, but this both improbable and insane.

If you have your story planned out you can easily reach 50,000 words in 30 days by writing approxomately 1,600 words each day. An experianced writer can do this in one to two hours. So in theory it would only take two months to write a 100,000 word novel writing at this modest pace. That's not counting all the time you spent planning and researching the damn thing, because it is very hard to write at this pace unless you know a fair ammount about your characters, setting, and story. Most chronic NaNo WriMoers seem to start "offically" researching and planning a year to six months before the contest, but they probably had the idea in their heads long before that.

Then there's editing. Guess what? You make a lot of mistakes when write a draft of 50,000 to 100,000 words in one to two months. If you follow the NaNo WriMo motto of "quantity before quality" like so many partisipants do you'll wind up with a first draft where nearly half the scenes are filler, so you'll have a lot of work on your hands.

But the good news is that if you don't become a perfectionist on the first draft you should be able to easily finish that in a few months without losing your mind, which is encouraging and a good first step. The bad news once the draft is done, then you have to fix it.

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Mike & the Bots
Making fun of my bad posts since 2/14/08.

omginternetlord

Obviously that is quite slow by any standards, but I think a typical speed is about 500 to 1000 words a day averaged. But you're gonna be going back all the time editing and stuff.

I think the most important thing is to keep a steady momentum. Just keep going.

SilkFX

^^Co-signing...I consider myself an experienced writer and I rarely hit more than 1000 words in a two-hour stretch. On the rare times I go beyond that, I end up deleting most of it.

You know what they say...slow and steady wins the race. (Okay, if slow isn't your thing, fine, but some kind of steady progress is required.)

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you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write