What's the longest novel you've ever written?

John342 said:

Umm... seriously? That's 86 words a minute for 96 hours straight! That strains belief.



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Yeah, that would surpass the world record by about five times.

40,000 words, so a novella rather than a novel. Which is OK when you realise that my first drafts are pretty bald telling-rather-than-showing extended outlines rather than actual books.

I missed the bonus question first time around. Honestly, i have no idea, as I never tally up wordcounts daily. However, if we take the example of the 100k novel written over 16 days, we can come up with an average of ~6k a day. Which isn't all that much when you think about it. I'm sure I used to write more like 14k at a time, once.

The longest story I've ever written was around 50,000 words before I abandoned it.

I personally don't like books that are 200 or 300k words long, to me they always seem to be over-written. You know, 3 pages of description about a character's hair. I like books that get to the end while still enjoying the journey. There's a balance.

Oh, and for the bonus question. Hm.. I don't really count daily words, but my guess is around 5,000. After that I'm usually beat for creativity for the day.

Over 1,000 pages long. But that was years ago when I was a much, much worse writer. I've learnt a lot about plotting and description and characters and how to cut out fluff since then. I vowed never to write something that big ever again. I used to think that the bigger something was the more impressive. No, not the case. I've been writing a short story this year and it may be small but it's better than that 1,000 tome that never went anywhere.

Longest? Uh, that'd be about 450K, a contemporary epic fantasy/police procedural in four parts (and a fifth under periodic development). It'll easily broach 500K upon completion (yeah, I know - thar' she blows!)...

The current WIP, a straight up contemporary murder mystery/police procedural, will come in at about 90K.

Lidiya said:

...ever?
Is it 300k...400k? Crazy, I know, but there are some posts I've seen here that make me think it's been done.

The longest one I've written is 16.5k...the one I'm working on now xD I just used to write flash fiction and novellas -- this is my first attempt at a 60k novel.

What about you?

Bonus Q: What's the most you've written in a day?

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210k is my longest. I edited it down to a 76k novel and two 6k short stories.

My longest novel is about 102k words; I think I was aiming for 95k and it got a bit longer after edits.

My largest single day word count is just shy of 12k words.

About 20 pages. . . . . Yeah, I'm working on that lol

I run short. 80k. Sigh. I long for the day when I have to cut, instead of add.

Lidiya said:

...ever?
Is it 300k...400k? Crazy, I know, but there are some posts I've seen here that make me think it's been done.

The longest one I've written is 16.5k...the one I'm working on now xD I just used to write flash fiction and novellas -- this is my first attempt at a 60k novel.

What about you?

Bonus Q: What's the most you've written in a day?

Click to expand...

125K. It was historical and mildly epic.

My previous WIP was about 90K, not including the 200k or so of material that I relegated to "trash" files.

My current WIP is now at 35K or so, looking towards about 90-100K. I have at least 200K discarded words thus far. At this rate, I'll have almost a million discarded words by the time I'm done with the WIP!

As far as words per day . . . I don't know! Maybe as much as 6K or 7K? 8K? My writing habits are irregular, so I don't keep track.

My last completed novel (my second one) came to 110k.

I don't know what the most was that I've written in a day, but I do remember one day where I started around 9:00 in the morning and finished around 10:00 at night, taking a total of about 2 hours for meals and breaks. I'll never do that again.

I also started out writing short stories that averaged between 6 and 10k. Then, I got this idea one day of writing a trilogy of short stories. The idea grew until it was bordering novella- and novel-length. Now, it's 90k.