Lauren once asked me how long it takes to write a book. Someone had told her “two years.”
It takes as long as you take to write it, Lauren. This will depend on several things.
- How long is the book? My shortest to date is 40,000 words. My longest is 160,000. That’s a factor of four to start with. Some writers think it necessary to go on for much longer: hundreds of thousands of words.
- How much care do you take over it? No sneering here: there are bad reasons as well as good ones for taking a long time over writing. It IS possible to write 100,000 words in six weeks (but it usually shows if you do.) Some writers take ten years to write one novel, carefully and painstakingly going over the text, waiting patiently for the ideas to emerge from their little dark burrows. All that care! I’d say that shows too.
- When do you think you’ve finished? It can be quite hard to say. Granted, a book that’s published and out there is almost certainly finished, but even that’s not always sure. If it isn’t published – if it went out and got rejected and its ghost still haunts your disk drive – why, who’s to say that you might not start over again?
These unhelpful thoughts aside, I’d say that if I’m not pursuing a career at the same time, I produce, on average, about one book a year in a form that I think is ‘finished’. Taking the novel I’m working on now as an example, after six months I am a bit over half of the way through the second draft. I reckon on three or four drafts, getting faster each time; so yes, about one year would be about right.
That’s slower than many authors, and certainly not as fast as some people say you need to produce if you want to be successful as a writer of light fiction. On the other hand it’s a lot faster than I could manage while I was also being a civil servant (three books in seventeen years, writing in fits and starts as it pleased me) or later when I was masquerading as an accountant (two in ten).
Could I be faster? Yes I could. Would it be any better for me if I were? I doubt it. Certainly I don’t think my writing would be better. That’s what counts with me.