How long did it take you to finish your first novel?

I've been working on the one I have closest to finished off and on for about... 15 years maybe? But only seriously for about 3-4 years of that. I'm not even done yet, I've only finished the first draft and I've gutted that now.

I'm almost done with my first novel in 20 something years, so I'm calling it my "first novel". It's taken me almost two years.

I dropped it pretty quickly. Maybe 10 days before moving on to a new story.

30+ novel, 100+ starts later, I'm hammering one out in 2 weeks.

My first attempt at a novel lasted about four months and 35k words before I gave it up. My second attempt I finished a first draft in about ten months (120k words) and spent about two months editing. I would probably want to spend fifty or sixty more hours on it before I would consider it polished.

I had the idea kicking about in my head for a good few years before sitting down and getting the thing out of me. I think it took about 7-8 month and weighed in at around 90k words. After reading through, I decided to completly re-write it and have done around 70 in about 3 months.

The thing that helped me finsih the first time, even when I thought things were getting dire, was wanting to actually finish the thing. Once I wrote 'The End' I knew it didn't matter how good or bad it was because I knew I would be writing those 2 words a lot moe times in teh future.

Good luck

I think my first took me about eighteen months. It was Godawful.

I now write a first draft in 6-8 weeks, but that doesn't mean much compared to others. Writers write at different speeds.

This one has taken me 3.5 years. I don't think any agent will want it, but still turned out pretty much how I wanted it to be. I will likely lock it away as a document of a certain period my life. One day I might even self-publish it, for the few out there who love sentimental urban-fantasy-slice-of-life stories.

I'm not sure people all agree on what was their first novel. Mine (the first one I finished) took two years and was 160k. It has never been in any shape to publish since I consider it to closely linked with books written by other authors (think Wheel of Time climbs in bed with Lord of The Rings.) But I did finish and I did have fun writing it.

My next work only took about a year and a half and was a measly 335k... My wife still thinks I should try and publish it.(She's biased, you think?) This one featured a totally original story which was a sci-fi contemporary story... (Think aliens have showed up.. and they aren't from Mexico.)

Since then I've written more and (IMO) gotten a lot better. My point is, a first novel is a dramatic learning experience, some people can do it, but I couldn't... not even close.

I have about six in the trunk that need work and two (with a 3rd completing) that I consider publishable as they stand. That's my story.

Only six years. My second took five months.

My first two? I gave up. I was about 16 when I gave up on the first one, and the second was just a few years ago.

My third one took me about a month to finish it. February to March, actually. I just finished another round of revisions about a week ago, and now it's going to be edited again, so still not done, I guess!

Technically, my first try was at age 12. I think I made about 10-15,000 words before stopping. Then there were several periodic attempts throughout middle and high school (all epic fails). The first one that was ever finished took me about 8 months.

It took me about 2 1/2 months to write a first-draft, and then another month and a half of editing... but now I'm trunking it. So, that'll show you what speed gets ya! haha but in all seriousness, it's crap.

6 mths to write the first draft, then another 9 mths or so to edit.

It took me 3 weeks to write the full first and very messy draft. Now it's been two months of me going through the whole book with edits, sitting with it for a while, and then going back etc. I go a week of editing, take 2 weeks off, and now I'm starting to go back through again.

Great question - and as the posts show, it differs for everyone.

My first novel took me about two years to finish (4-6 hours a week). To me that's the key, how many hours. Because I could say 18 months and it could be 1 hour a week for some or 10 hours a week for another. So we'll say for my first novel it took me about 400-500 hours.

That one was a shorter novel, 25,000 words. Looking back that blows my mind it took that long. But I didn't have any outline, any idea how "write"...all I knew was that I wanted the story on the paper.

My second novel - a bit longer at 40,000 - took me 4 years to write, but...(as I mentioned above, hours are a better indicator, at least to me) that was writing some months and then taking very long haitus's not writing. At the end of the day, it probably took me 200-300 hours for that one.

The book I'm currently working on is much longer (100,000+) and is the first in a trilogy. I have been working on it for 3.5 years. The first year was plotting and brainstorming and research - 2-3 hours a week (125 hours). The second year was outlining and scene summaries - 3-4 hours a week (175) hours). The third year was writing the first draft - 4--5 hours a week (about 200 hours). And for the last 2-3 months I'm on the first revision - 3-4 hours a week. So for my third book, which is already 4 times longer than my first book, I have spent roughly the same amount of time I did for my first book. I have grown as a writer and with each sitting I find that I learn something new!

It's a wonderful process that a writer gets to experience over and over and over again - learning and growing and getting better!

It took exactly three weeks, but I had to write it that fast because an agent asked for it. I queried her, but neglected to mention that I hadn't written it yet. She called and said it sounded great, but also said she needed it by the first of the next month in order to get it to an editor who had an empty slot that my novel sounded perfect for.

What can you do? I wrote it, sent it to her, and it sold to the editor she had in mind.

This is not a method I recommend. I didn't know at the time that you were supposed to write a novel, and then query.

I popped 'How long to finish first novel' into the Google Custom Site Search box (toward the bottom leftt of every page) and bingo!

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6252926

Handy tool.

Good thread anyways. Always new folk around.

Me? Three months to finish first draft. But retired, so no time pressures. 100,000 plus words. Now substantially reduced but it's still there. Where? Somewhere!

Been working on my 80,000-word novel for about seven years. I keep thinking I'm on my final edit, but then there's another and another. Csorensen makes a good point about the value of considering how many hours it's taken rather than how much time in years, months, etc. There have been weeks, even months, when I haven't worked on the novel. I've been putting a lot of time into it over the past several months, though, and it looks like I'll be done in a couple of weeks. I got to "the end" the first time after about three years.

Something I've learned, and that I'll apply to the next one, is to resist the urge to edit as I go along. (Well, to resist it some.) It's okay to leave known imperfections and keep going. They can be improved later. But that might not be needed because portions get edited out. There are portions I've spent considerable time on, polishing them up nice and shiny; then I've realized that they don't fit into the entire story well enough, and I've had to chop them. Seems the process will be more fun/less tedious to keep going past the mistakes. And in the long run, it will save time to wait to polish until later in the game, when there's a better idea of what portions will be kept.

My first first one, when I was 11-12, took about eight or ten months for 45k words. But I don't count that one.

My first Serious one took about two months for the first draft... then another year+ of rewriting and editing and some more rewriting and some more editing.

Over a decade. I'm not kidding.

Twenty nine days, during NaNoMo.

My first one is the cover in my sig. Its a shorter one, only 30k, and took two weeks.

The first draft of my novel took me about four or five years to finish. Granted, I wasn't entirely serious with it until about two years ago. I'm almost done with my second draft and will be moving on to the third. It's never ending, is it?

3-4 months. It wasn't very good (in my defense, I was 17), but it was novel length (100K words). I still usually write in about that much time, although I generally spend more time editing than writing. (I stopped writing for a long while, and have recently returned. Last novel took two weeks, but am still editing it a year later. (But getting close to submitting to agents. I think. Unless my betas suggest just one more major change once I'm done with the last round of revisions.)