Nobody knows, and nobody has measured it.
There is no dataset, no publisher statement, no survey, and no professional body figure on how long drafting a novel takes. Every "a novel takes six months" or "two years" figure in circulation comes from someone's own experience or from sites selling writing courses.
That is the honest answer, and it is more useful than a made-up number because it stops you measuring yourself against a fiction.
What Is Actually Measured
The only institutional throughput figures in publishing measure editing, not writing. The Editorial Freelancers Association surveys its members and publishes pages per hour by service; Editors Canada publishes guideline rates. Both use a 250-word page.
Those numbers cannot be repurposed for drafting. Editing a page and writing one are not comparable activities, and no source attempts the conversion.
So the defensible position is: authoritative sources describe how long it takes to edit a manuscript, and are silent on how long it takes to write one.
You Can Plan the Second Half
This is the practical value of the asymmetry. Drafting time is unknowable in advance, but the stages after it have real numbers.
For a 90,000 word novel, which is 360 standard pages, the two bodies give very different figures:
| Pass | EFA, surveyed | Editors Canada, guideline |
|---|---|---|
| Developmental | 36 to 65 hours | 120 to 360 hours |
| Copy editing | 36 to 60 hours | 51 to 90 hours |
| Proofreading | 24 to 36 hours | 40 to 60 hours |
They disagree by a factor of two overall and by more on the developmental pass, which is itself worth knowing. Details in developmental vs line vs copy editing.
Beta reading has a figure too: the EFA prices it at 16 to 40 pages an hour, so a 360 page novel is roughly 9 to 22 hours of reading for someone doing it professionally. Volunteers fitting it around a job need calendar time, not clock time, as covered in how to send a manuscript to a beta reader.
Why the Question Resists an Answer
Worth understanding rather than just accepting.
"Writing a novel" is not one activity. It covers planning, drafting, restructuring, rewriting and polishing, and people include different subsets when they answer.
First novels and later novels are different problems. A first novel includes learning to write a novel.
Almost nobody writes full time. The variable that dominates is available hours per week, which has nothing to do with the book.
Abandoned and rewritten drafts are invisible. A novel written in a year may have three earlier years behind it that nobody counts.
Any average across those would be meaningless even if someone had collected it.
A More Useful Question
Rather than how long a novel takes, ask how many words a week you can sustain, because that is measurable from your own record within a fortnight and it is the only input that actually predicts your finish date.
500 words a day is a 90,000 word draft in six months. 250 words a day is a year. Those are arithmetic, not estimates, and they are as close to a real answer as anyone can give you.
What the research does support is that regularity beats intensity: short daily sessions outperformed long intense ones on output, publication and mood. See how many words should I write a day.
What Deckle Does
Deckle records what you actually do, which is the only data that answers this question for you specifically.
Daily word counts are net, so deletions take back the words they added. For estimating a finish date that matters: a gross count flatters you and produces a date you will miss.
Writing time is tracked separately, in active minutes as you type rather than time with the app open.
The writing trends view is where a fortnight of data turns into a sustainable weekly rate, and from there into an arithmetic finish date for your book rather than a generic one.
The honest use of these features is not to hit a target someone else set, but to find out what your own rate is and plan from it.
Common Mistakes
- Believing a published timeframe. No such figure has been measured.
- Comparing yourself to a famous author's pace. Most wrote full time and had already learned how.
- Planning from a good week. Plan from an ordinary one.
- Counting gross words. Net progress is what reaches the finish line.
- Forgetting the second half. Editing a 90,000 word novel is 96 to 330 hours depending on whose figures you use.
- Treating a first novel as typical. It includes learning to write one.
FAQ
Q: How long does it take to write a novel? A: No authoritative source has ever measured it. Anyone quoting a figure is generalising their own experience.
Q: Can I estimate it myself? A: Yes, and it is the only reliable way. Track your rate for two weeks and divide.
Q: How long does editing take? A: For 90,000 words, roughly 96 to 161 hours by EFA figures, or 211 to 330 by Editors Canada's.
Q: Is faster better? A: The research favours regularity over intensity, and found binge writers produced less overall.
Q: Why does nobody publish this? A: Because "writing a novel" covers different activities for different people, and almost nobody does it full time.