HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO WRITE A NOVEL?

 

Someone asked me yesterday how long it takes to write a novel. The National Novel Writing Month (=NaNoWriMo, November) makes folks who don't write novels think it takes a month to write a full-length novel for adults.

Articles such as this (from Writers Digest) give a wild range of two and a half days to sixteen years.

Seems to me the definition of what constitutes writing a novel is what needs clarifying, because these estimates are comparing apples to oranges, or more likely— watermelons to olives. Technically, both are fruits. But this is where the similarity ends.

It’s not only the size and scope, but what do they mean by “writing a novel in X number of days.”

If NaNoWriMo is the definer, we’re speaking about finishing a first draft. Writers know that is just the beginning. It has become a sort of fashion among genre writers to fast-draft a first draft. A month’s first draft will be followed by many more, but you could claim to have written the novel in a month.

When the claim is that it took many years, we are not speaking of working on the novel five days a week for years. These books had long stretches of sitting in a drawer, real or virtual, before the writer finished the umpteenth draft and called it done.

If we look for any kind of metric, those who do not write novels would do better to ask about the general rhythm or work discipline of different writers. Every day? Only on weekends? Now and again? How many hours at a writing session?

And there, too, are wild differences. No wrong and right, just long and write.

©Tom Gauld

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Writers Need More Readers

With official summer around the corner, some think it the season for pleasure reading.

After all, when else will career busy folks put down their technical must-read-for-work books? When else will school children pick up books they want to read but don’t have to?

Turns out that a whole nation embraces creative writing, and we now have a National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a NaNoWriMo every November. But as more people are writing novels than ever before, fewer are reading them.

Leisure time is precious. Between movie streaming and internet news and animal videos, people have found time to write and encourage each other to publish. But who will read all that output?
Other than committed writers who read and write year-round, (not only in November) and children assigned books at school, most Americans do not read much fiction for pleasure. To illustrate the point, more than ninety percent of book groups are middle aged (and older) women. This leaves out a lot of people, many of whom don’t read a single work of fiction if they don't have to.

I think it’s time for National Novel Reading Month.

The internet tells us there is a National Reading Month. it falls in March, in honor of Doctor Seuss’s birthday. The great doctor should be honored, but this suggests a designation aimed at very young readers only. What happened to all the novels written in November if in March we read picture books? Besides, who’s ever heard of this NaRe[ading]Mo if they didn’t search? Where is the engine that drives this to be an actual national event?

I think July is a better candidate for the honor. But any month will do. 

Just sayin’.

NaNoWriMo* Part 2

*I explained this in an old post, here

As the month of November comes to its inevitable conclusion, all across this land writers either pat their own backs because they made it or wail that they did not reach the goal of fifty-thousand words in thirty days. The latter is more common, as it turns out.

I hope that if you participated you made your goal. I hope that if you didn’t make it, it was worth doing anyway.

But I must say I don’t get it.

Writing by the word count is something I finally understood as helpful to pacing in a novel. Butt-in-chair is also something I understand. Sometimes it’s just like that. You have to sit and do it, muse missing. Writing every day is what many think is the only way to do it if you are serious.

But writing with the crowd?

For me, the very notion that I am part of millions doing the same thing at the same time is an anathema. I have no illusions that when I sit down and conjure a story I am doing something no one has ever done before. But, at the same time,I tell myself I’m doing something of singular value. If I don’t do it, it won’t be done.

I also found the value of the self-discipline. "Self" here stands for creating in a pace and a manner assigned to oneself. I struggled with this issue until my late twenties. I had no problem meeting others’ deadlines. But I rarely managed to finish anything that no one was waiting for and that was self-assigned.

Then I found a way, and I’ve been fortunate ever since. Thank you, the great guardian of creativity, for this gift.

If National Writing Month is your thing, I raise a toast to you for the fine effort. I hope the result is just as fine. But if you failed to meet this goal please consider that your way of creating may not fit with this painting party, and keep looking for how *you* work best to do your best work.