How Long Does It Really Take to Write a Novel? Measured Durations, Not Legends
Writing the first draft of an 80,000-word novel takes between two months and a year and a half depending on your weekly pace, and revision usually takes at least as long again. The question "how long does it take to write a book" does not have one answer but a table, because the duration depends on only two numbers: the length you are aiming for and how many words you write per week. Here it is, calculated with a fifteen percent margin for blank weeks.
| Target length | 1,000 words a week | 2,500 words a week | 5,000 words a week | 12,000 words a week (November challenge) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50,000 words (short novel) | 58 weeks, about 13 months | 23 weeks, about 5 months | 12 weeks, about 3 months | 5 weeks |
| 80,000 words (standard novel) | 92 weeks, about 21 months | 37 weeks, about 8 months | 18 weeks, about 4 months | 8 weeks |
| 120,000 words (long novel) | 138 weeks, about 32 months | 55 weeks, about 13 months | 28 weeks, about 6 months | 12 weeks |
The rest of this article explains how to read this table, how to recalculate it for your own case, and why the durations usually quoted teach you nothing.
Why the legends do not answer the question
The same anecdotes turn up everywhere: this author writes a first draft in a season, that one took ten years, another has written every morning at the same hour for thirty years. Stephen King says in "On Writing" that he aims to finish a first draft in three months. That is true for him, and it says nothing about you, for a simple reason: his duration is the product of his pace, and his pace is that of a full-time author with decades of practice.
An anecdote gives you a duration without giving you the pace. But the pace is the transferable part. Nobody can copy "three months"; everybody can measure "how many words I actually write per week" and derive their own duration from it. That is what the table above does.
The calculation, for your case
The formula fits on one line:
Weeks = (target length ÷ words per week) × 1.15
The 1.15 factor covers blank weeks: illness, holidays, moving house, the start of the school year. Over a year, that is about seven weeks without writing, which is a cautious estimate for someone with a life.
Example. You are aiming for 90,000 words. Over the last four weeks, you have measured an average of 1,800 words a week. Calculation: 90,000 ÷ 1,800 = 50 weeks, × 1.15 = 57.5 weeks, roughly thirteen months for the first draft.
Two notes on measuring. First, do not take your best week, take the average of four ordinary ones. Second, if you do not yet have four weeks to measure, write for four weeks and come back; any estimate made before that is a hunch, not a calculation. The statistics in the Sagoræ hub show this weekly average and project the finish date from it, which saves you redoing the multiplication every time.
What length to aim for
The left-hand column of the table is a choice. A first novel rarely needs to go past 80,000 words, and many genres work perfectly well at 60,000. The ranges by genre, with what publishers expect, are laid out in novel word count by genre. Aiming for 70,000 rather than 110,000 almost halves the duration; it is the single most effective decision you can make about writing time, and it is made before the first sentence.
What the table does not measure: revision
The table gives the duration of the first draft. A finished book needs revision, and the most honest workshop rule is to budget at least as much time for revising as for writing the first draft. A novel drafted in eight months is therefore a novel finished in sixteen, sometimes more if reader feedback forces a structural rewrite.
That should not discourage you: revision is more predictable than drafting. You know what you have, you know what is wrong, you move chapter by chapter. It is the first draft that has the air pockets.
The three factors that stretch everything
The table assumes a constant pace. Three things break it.
The first is the long stop. Not the blank week, already built into the 1.15 factor, but the three months when the file stays closed. They almost always happen at the same places in the manuscript, and they are avoidable if you see them coming; the three zones and their fixes are described in how to finish a novel: where writers actually quit.
The second is rewriting along the way. Every reread of chapter 1 while you are writing chapter 9 is time subtracted from the first draft with no word added. The counter does not move, the finish date slides back.
The third is switching projects. A novel dropped at 30,000 words for another, shinier one resets the counter to zero. Two half-written novels make zero novels.
Three paces, three lives
The columns of the table are not talent levels, they are schedules. A thousand words a week is a parent writing three thirty-minute evenings. Two and a half thousand is a commuter writing on the train every morning. Five thousand is someone who frees up an hour a day. These three schedules are laid out hour by hour in how to write a novel while working full time.
The last column, 12,000 words a week, is the pace of the November challenge: 50,000 words in 30 days. It is a sprint pace, not a life pace, and it produces a short first draft in five weeks at the cost of an intensity nobody sustains all year. It has its place, once a year, for those who know what they are going to write; the conditions for holding it without burning out are in the 30-day novel method now that NaNoWriMo is gone.
A full calendar, on an invented novel
To make all this concrete, here is the calendar of a fictional novel, "The Tide House", 75,000 words targeted, written by an author who measured 2,000 words a week over her first four weeks.
| Stage | Calculation | Duration | Dates (starting October 1st) |
|---|---|---|---|
| First draft | 75,000 ÷ 2,000 × 1.15 | 43 weeks | October 1st to July 31st |
| Resting the manuscript | Fixed | 4 weeks | August |
| Structural revision | One chapter every two days, 30 chapters | 9 weeks | September to mid-November |
| Line editing and proofreading | One chapter a day | 5 weeks | Mid-November to end of December |
| Beta readers and final changes | Fixed | 8 weeks | January to end of February |
Seventeen months between the first sentence and a manuscript you can send out. None of these figures is heroic, and that is the point: an author with a day job, writing 2,000 words a week, has a finished book in a year and a half if she does not stop for three months along the way. The calendar does not need talent, it needs continuity.
How to know whether your estimate is right
Redo the calculation every four weeks with your real average. If the finish date moves back every time, the problem is not your pace, it is one of the three factors above. If it stays put, you know when you will finish, and that certainty is worth more than any famous author's anecdote.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to write a 300-page novel? Three hundred pages is roughly 80,000 to 90,000 words. At 2,500 words a week, budget eight to nine months for the first draft, and as long again for revision.
Can you write a book in 3 months? A 50,000-word first draft, yes, at about 4,500 words a week, which is an hour a day for most people. A finished, revised book in three months is much rarer.
How many words a day should I write? That is the wrong unit. Count per week, from your real sessions, and derive the duration. Five hundred words a day, five days out of seven, is 2,500 a week.
How long does it take to revise a novel? At least as long as the first draft, sometimes longer if the structure has to be reworked after the first round of reader feedback.
If you want a measured weekly average and a finish date calculated from it, Sagoræ offers a free trial, no card required.
✒️ Read next: How to Finish a Novel: Where Writers Actually Quit, and How to Get Past It · How to Get Back to a Novel You Abandoned Years Ago: A 7-Day Method · How to Write a Novel While Working Full Time: Three Real Schedules
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