I found these tidbits in the essay “Five Questions Every First Novelist Must Answer” by W. C. Stroby in _The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Novel Writing_ (Writer’s Digest Book: 1992)
Coonts advises a first-time novelist to plan for at least 2,000 hours in order to complete a novel of any length. He suggested two to four hours a day for the beginner, Monday to Friday, which I calculate would take about two to four years.
I had previously estimated for a 90,000 word novel about 1,000-1,500 hours. My limited experience in fiction has already showed how many drafts upon drafts it takes to find the story, only to edit and edit before the prose is sufficiently polished and the dialogue chewable. On top of that the research seems to consume about a quarter of the time. So I felt relieved to her 2,000 hours recommended by a pro. I’m sure other first-time authors write faster—though I suspect not (on average) with great literary quality and/or bestselling success.
Does anyone else have figures on completion times from successful novelists? Likewise, figures for short story writing would be appreciated.
In creativity rising,
John
John A. Manley
creativityrising@distributel.net
My personal time estimation for my WIP? When it gets done.
Here is a link to something OSC sort of said on the subject:
http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/1998-07-16.shtml
You will have to scroll to the very last section to get to the bit about "How long..." but the whole things is worth your while.
quote:
Swallowing the Whale. But what do you have against novels? Is it the length that intimidates you? It shouldn't. Novels may be ten times the pages (or more), but they are not ten times the storyline. I find that it takes as much energy to create a good short story as to create a good novel -- the development time is the same. Only the typing time differs -- and not by that much.Let's say you have six months of writing ahead of you. Twenty-six weeks, 182 days. Let's say that when you're really moving on a story, you can write five pages a day; when you're just starting out, though, you write only two usable pages a day. Most writers I know are like me in that they can't finish a story and immediately plunge in and write at full speed on the next. You need time to shift gears, to change from one imaginary world to another. And I'm not speaking just of science fiction, fantasy, or historical fiction, in which you literally change worlds. Even in realistic contemporary fiction, you have to move into the world that your characters inhabit -- their relationships, their locale, their work, their concerns.
So let's be fantastically optimistic, and say that it takes you only a week to let go of one story and get started on the next. And let's say that your stories are an average of 3,000 words in length (a bit long for li-fi, quite short for sci-fi). Using a "page" of 250 words, a novel of 100,000 words is 400 pages and a story of 3,000 words is twelve pages.
In writing the novel, you struggle with the new voices and milieux for the first fifty pages. That's twenty-five days at two good pages a day. But after that, you're really in your stride, and you can average five good pages a day. So the remaining 350 pages take you seventy days. Allowing yourself some days off, so you can have a life, you've got a novel finished in about a hundred days.
My second novel is still unfinished but I see an end in sight soon..hopefully...maybe...if all goes as planned. Who knows when? The truth is, I'm trying not to care. What really matters is what the end result is, not how long it takes you to get there.
My 2 cents....
My most humble and possibly misinformed opinion,
-Matt
At my rate of writing I think 2000 hours is a pretty good guess. (Of course being uber-analytical, that equates to only about 50 words an hour, written, revised and edited.)
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited July 04, 2005).]