How long do you take to write your novel?

unlaumy

unlaumy

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Eldoria said:
Writing is easy. If we just write about our daily activities, 10k or even 30k a week is easy.

However, writing fiction isn't about word count... it's about bringing the story to live in the minds of the author and the readers. It's intellectual work, not just typing.
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Yup. I'm not interested in reaching higher number or pumping up chapters every day. Just look at my (lonely) 500 words work lol. For me, slow and fast writing is just a state of mind. There's nothing to be gained with 200 words or 20 000 words in a week other than satisfaction (if you're anxious to prove your works, this may be not the best mentality to work with).
 
Ral_062

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For me it would either take a month for a single chapter. now your thinking why does it take that long? Good question, there was this one chapter i started to write, i began writing it on my paper while began to encode it right after finishing it. I realized that chapter alone was the longest draft ever because i added so many sequences in that chapter alone.

Even now as im revamping the old chapters, i have to split it into parts just to shorten it. And the one im currently revising has many sequences that i'll just cut to parts because no one would read a long ah chapter.

In summary, when i write a sequence it would probably take a day.
As a whole chapter? Depending on how many sequences it has, it could take weeks and even a month
 
Nolff

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L1aei said:
Yes. I didn't enjoy being accused like that over Discord in a public channel either because I was struggling at work and at home for a burning passion I never wanted to let go of; I was truly addicted to writing. In fact, back then, I didn't call myself an author. I identified as a writer because that was all I wanted to do. At work, I would even stop what I was doing, grab some scissors to cut or rip a piece of paper and jot down more ideas I had for my chapters to bring home and simply write more and more. I didn't want to stop.

To give you an idea of how dead on my feet I was, I walked straight into a wall at work because I dozed off making my way to the breakroom.
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Assurbanipal_II said:
I am ultra slow ... :blob_teary: 500 words a day max ...
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That's record. Mine is 900 a month. Not that I'm telling you I'm weak, but hot dang, being a student in a boarding school requires commitment and focus.
 
tantrayaan

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Depends on the novel. My first novel arc I didn't start with a proper outline or a plan. I just wrote because I was in my happy place when I wrote. It ended up being ~650k words. Took me 6 months to draft the whole story. I worked on it part time of course. Some parts wrote themselves faster than others.

My other novel ~350k words took about 3months.
 
L1aei

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laum-hy said:
Seeing the replies, I may be misunderstanding this, is it ~10 000 words for all novels or separately (so more words) in a week? Because 10k words/week is horribly realistic and anyone who doesn't believe it are the weird ones. 20/30 000 words is crazy, but doable. Take the understandable 1k/hour and sell your soul to the devil (or sacrifice your sleep), and you can achieve it. There was even some dude on the internet who tried a 50 000 words in a week. He did it. It WAS horrible, but he still did it.
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Across multiple novels, but me saying that would be misleading because I had quite a few novels being oneshots.
 
Rachel_Leia_Cole

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For me, it depends on how much the story talks to me. I tend to do over 2000 words per chapter. Some days, the words come easy. Others I’m staring at a thesaurus trying to decide between one word or the other. To be honest, I began my first novel when I was 16. That was back in 1996. I never finished, and shelved it for many years. Flash forward to last year, when I found my original draft. It still had potential, though not through a 16 year old’s lens. I wrote and re wrote until it became my first completed novel, the Goblin King of Eldoria. So that one definitely took me the longest. Compare that with book two, where I already knew the nuances of the characters. I finished that one in a couple of months, in between working a full time job. Currently working on book 3 now ?
 
ElijahRyne

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Firestorm22345 said:
For me, I took about 5 days to write. Monday and Friday are the dates of releasing a new chapter for my The Youth Gang novel. Otherwise, the system shows 1 chapter/week which might be an error for me. But still, I may have some distractions like having a holiday at the release date, watching a new season of my favourite anime series and longer development. How about you guys?
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If it is the first chapter or prologue, I can make one every three hours so long as they are less than 2.5k words. For every chapter following after the first though add one day to how long it took for the last chapter.
 
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I wrote four novels between 2 to 3 months and then two of them took almost 6 months. And then the most recent has been about two years because of some gaps.
 
Zagaroth

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I'm averaging about 275k words a year (I am a little past the three year mark and have 900K words written).

That's a bit over 2 large novels a year.

The time for a specific chapter? All over the place. Sometimes I write 2 in a single day, other times it takes me a week to write even one.
 
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