How long does it take to write a novel?

The Short Answer

For most first-time novelists, a solid first draft takes one to three years. Revisions add another six to twelve months. Total time from blank page to "ready to query or self-publish" is usually two to four years for a first book.

For experienced novelists with a day job, a draft per year is a common pace. Full-time novelists publish one to two books a year if they are genre writers, one every two to four years if they are literary writers. There is no "normal" beyond that range.

The rest of this article breaks down why those numbers look like that, what affects them, and how to pick a realistic target for your own book.

The Only Math That Matters

Writing a novel is not mysterious. It is arithmetic. A novel is a certain number of words. You write a certain number per session. Divide one by the other and you get the number of sessions. Multiply by the gap between sessions and you get the timeline.

Standard novel lengths by genre:

• Middle grade: 30,000 to 50,000 words
• Young adult: 50,000 to 90,000 words
• Contemporary / literary fiction: 70,000 to 100,000 words
• Romance: 70,000 to 90,000 words
• Mystery / thriller: 70,000 to 100,000 words
• Fantasy / sci-fi: 80,000 to 120,000 words, sometimes 150,000+
• Epic fantasy: 100,000 to 200,000 words

For the examples below, we'll use an 80,000-word target. Scale up or down as needed for your genre.

Realistic Timelines at Different Paces

Here is what an 80,000-word first draft looks like at a range of sustainable daily word counts. These assume five writing days a week. Weekends, sick days, and life events are built in.

Two things jump out of this table. First, even modest daily targets finish books. 500 words a day sounds like nothing, but it produces an 80,000-word draft in under eight months. Second, the gap between 500 and 2,000 words a day is not just "four times as productive." It changes what kind of writer you are: part-time versus full-time.

The Revision Factor Nobody Plans For

Every timeline calculation above is for a first draft. Revision is separate, and it usually takes longer than writers expect.

Common revision timelines:

• Light revision pass: 1 to 2 months. Sentence polish, continuity fixes, obvious problem scenes.
• Full structural revision: 3 to 6 months. Moving scenes, cutting subplots, rewriting whole chapters.
• Near-total rewrite (common for first novels):6 to 18 months. Most first novels go through at least one of these before querying.

A realistic full timeline for a first novel: 8 months of drafting plus 6 to 12 months of revision equals roughly 14 to 20 months. Second novels usually go faster because the writer has learned what to cut during drafting instead of during revision.

Famous Writing Timelines for Context

Known examples span an enormous range.

Fast:

• Jack Kerouac wrote the first draft of On the Road in about three weeks on a single scroll of taped-together paper. (He had been thinking about the book for years before writing.)
• Stephen King wrote The Running Man in a week. He wrote many of his early novels in a few months each.
• Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the first draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three to six days.
• Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in about three weeks.
• NaNoWriMo asks writers to hit 50,000 words in 30 days, which is 1,667 words a day. Millions have done it.

Average:

• Most published midlist novelists turn in a draft every 9 to 18 months.
• Genre romance writers frequently ship a draft every 3 to 6 months, sometimes faster, because plot structures are well understood and drafts need less rebuilding.
• John Steinbeck drafted The Grapes of Wrath in about 100 days, working about 2,000 words a day.

Slow:

• Donna Tartt took 11 years on The Goldfinch and 10 years on The Little Friend.
• J.R.R. Tolkien worked on The Lord of the Rings for 12 years.
• Jeffrey Eugenides took 9 years on Middlesex.
• Junot Díaz took 11 years on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

The lesson from this list is not "aim for Kerouac" or "aim for Tartt." It is that there is no correct speed. Publishable novels come from writers working at wildly different paces. What every one of them has in common is that they kept going until the book was done.

What Actually Determines Your Timeline

Four factors predict how long a novel will take you, ordered roughly by weight.

1. Consistency, not peak speed

A writer who hits 500 words a day, 250 days a year, produces 125,000 words. A writer who hits 3,000 words on three Saturdays a year and nothing else produces 9,000 words. Fast days feel productive. Consistent days finish books.

This is why trackers with streaks work so well for novelists. Streaks reward showing up, which is the actual load-bearing behavior. For more on this, see The Science of Writing Streaks.

2. How much planning you did before drafting

Plotters (who outline extensively) usually draft faster and revise less. Pantsers (who discover the story as they write) usually draft slower and revise heavily. Neither is wrong; the total time is often similar. The time just sits in different buckets.

3. Whether it is your first novel

First novels almost always take longer than you planned, because you are learning to write a novel at the same time. Second novels go faster. By the fourth or fifth, most writers have an internal sense of pacing, structure, and cut-worthy material that makes drafting cleaner and revision shorter.

4. Life

Day job, kids, health, caregiving, moves, breakups. Life adds months. A realistic timeline budgets for that. If you assume a perfect year and then have a hard winter, you feel like a failure. If you plan for messy life and write anyway, a hard winter just shifts the finish date.

How to Pick a Realistic Finish Date

A four-step process most novelists in the Authorlytica beta use:

1. Decide your target word count. Use your genre's standard range.
2. Track your actual writing pace for two weeks.Do not change anything. Just write and log. At the end of two weeks, you'll have a real daily average, not a hoped-for one.
3. Do the math. Target divided by daily average equals writing days. Multiply by seven over (writing days per week) to get calendar weeks.
4. Add 30 to 50% buffer. Sick days, travel, bad weeks. If the raw math says five months, plan for seven.

Authorlytica does this math automatically once you set a project goal and deadline. The projected finish date updates after every session based on your actual output.

When Your Timeline Is Slipping

Every novelist eventually notices their pace has slowed. What to do about it depends on why.

If the slowdown is life, do not fight it. Lower the daily target, keep the streak small, protect the habit. A reduced target that you hit is better than an ambitious target that you skip.

If the slowdown is the plot, do not keep grinding. Spend a session planning. Sometimes 30 minutes of outlining the next three chapters unblocks weeks of drafting.

If the slowdown is motivation, look at your streak, your monthly chart, and your total words. The evidence that you have been writing is more real than the feeling that you have not. See also Why you keep abandoning your novel.

The Role of a Tracker

A tracker does not write the novel. It does three things that shorten the average timeline for writers who use one:

• Makes today's writing feel like part of the book.The pace line shows you are moving toward the finish. Every session counts, visibly.
• Makes the pace mathematical, not emotional."Am I on track?" gets answered by a number, not a feeling. Most writers overestimate how behind they are.
• Carries the streak. The streak is the single most reliable motivator for long-form work, and you cannot maintain one in your head.

Related: The writing tracker built for novelists.

The Bottom Line

Writing a novel takes months. Sometimes years. Almost never a week, for anyone who is not already Stephen King. The timeline depends far more on daily consistency than on inspiration, talent, or available time.

If you can write 500 words a day, five days a week, without breaking, you can finish an 80,000-word draft in roughly eight months. That is a realistic, achievable pace for a writer with a full life.

The question is not "do I have time to write a novel." The question is "can I hold the habit long enough to finish one." A tracker helps with that. The rest is showing up.

Common Questions

Is two years too long to write a first novel?

No. Two years from blank page to finished revision is a normal timeline for a first novel. It feels long in the middle. It is not a sign that something is wrong.

Is six months too fast?

Not for a draft. A 90,000-word draft in six months is 750 words a day, five days a week. Plenty of novelists do this. The revision afterwards is what usually takes the real time.

Can I write a novel in 30 days like NaNoWriMo?

You can write 50,000 words in 30 days, which is a short novel or a long novella draft. Whether it is good depends on the writer and the prep work. Many novelists use November to break the "I've never drafted a novel" barrier and then spend the next year revising.

How much faster does a second novel go?

Typically 20 to 40% faster than a first. You know what a full draft feels like, you know which parts to cut earlier, and you have a working writing habit.