What is the theoretical bare minimum amount of time required to write a novel?
Asked by
PhiNotPi (
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May 27th, 2013
Early today we had a question about the length of a typical novel. My question now is: how long does it take to write a novel?
In practically, most of the time spent will be spent thinking. It takes a lot of time to think through a novel and come up with enough ideas to make the plot interesting.
This question, however, is only concerned the amount of time that is spent physically writing the novel.
Lets assume that I am a super-genius who already knows every last letter of the novel that I want to write. If I have a pen with unlimited ink and and infinite supply of college-ruled notebook paper, how long will will it take me to write down my novel?
If we were to replace the paper with a computer, how long would it take?
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15 Answers
It depends on how fast you can type. At 140 wpm, you could write a novel in about 5 hours.
Does anyone know how fast a typical person can write with their hands?
Wikipedia says people write about 31 words per minute when they know ahead of time what it is they’re writing down. This would translate to 21.5 hours for a novel.
It also says that a person who is copying will have an average speed of 22 wpm, or over 30 hours for a novel.
Edit: this question was solved very quickly, I’m going to have to ask a physics question next.
Let’s assume that you followed the typical writing suggestion of doing a page a day. This way you can still go to work, have a social life, eat and sleep with very little restriction.
For a first draft of your novel it would take you about one hundred days to finish, or about four months.
If you stretch that time out to six months, that could theoretically account for any revisions you need to do, and still leave your publisher about six months of their own to squabble with you over some scenes and suggest changes.
This is very likely how many authors do it, or at least the ones that churn out book after book year after year.
According to some Jellies, I’ve written several novels on Fluther. Depending upon how passionate I was about the subject (or whether I had to do research while I was writing) it has taken me anywhere between 2 minutes to several hours to create my novels.
1hr 28mins 32secs, so long as you used the toilet beforehand.
@ucme What’s the basis for that answer?
Can’t say yet… it’s taking me a lifetime to start one!
I have a few friends who write a novel every January. They don’t really do anything with the novels, but they do write them.
3 days, 12 hours and 42 minutes.
dammit! i wish you could see how far apart i’m holding my thumb and forefinger . . .
Stephen King seems to grind out about 1 per month.
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