Many times. I once knocked it out in a week. Didn't sleep much. It was shit. For every successful writer that says you should do it one way there is another that says you shouldn't.
My first draft isn't perfect, far from it, but it's usually at least half way there. I only consider it 'writing' if I'm actually paying attention to it, and that includes sentence crafting, literary devices, consideration to characterisation, dialogue and obviously, plot. First draft-wise, I might leave some scenes out, if I'm not 'feeling' them and need to move on. I'll leave little comments throughout, prompting me to do something later on, like come up with a name of a town, or insert transitional description, or to foreshadow, things like that. Sometimes, I'll write only spoken dialogue on the first pass on the chapter, and add in tags, background action, description, internal monologue etc later. I go through each finished chapter a couple of times before I move on because I like my draft tidy and coherent. I find that making an effort to consider all that, helps with ideas where to take the story next. So that's the first draft, usually doesn't need major re-writes in terms of plot, but it will need quite a bit of polishing. Prior to starting to write a draft, I can outline, do research, write scene plans, even some scenes and snippets, but until I start writing it properly, I don't call it a draft.
BTW, as far as the usefulness of the answer it's exactly the same question. How long does it take you to write 60k? Well, that all depends on that particular 60k and all the circumstances surrounding it. The context is more important than the amount of words. Without context the question is meaningless. For most people every 60k will likely be different for about a billion tiny, individual reasons. And if it does take the same time every 60k, to paraphrase one of my fav authors, you're not writing. You're typing. But obviously it's perfectly ok to ask a question like this out of curiosity to gauge how long it takes different people. It's just, meaningless.
I wrote 70,000 words in the month of April 2012. Yes, that one month. It was my first-ever novel and I was super-enthusiastic about it and had all day available to write. But the novel was crap, and I ended up accidentally deleting my only copy of the manuscript, so that it's now gone. Since then I've written only short stories, and I don't write every day, but I can reliably produce between 7,000 and 10,000 words of first draft per week. That prorates to 84,000 to 120,000 words in three months. So, speaking strictly in terms of first drafts, then a writer who literally has all day free to write might be able to complete a first draft of his novel in three months. But note I say MIGHT. I'm not saying every writer works that way. I'm just saying it's not flat-out impossible the way some people seem to think. EDIT: Did King say how long he thinks a writer should take to _complete_ a novel, from start of draft outline to final, polished product? That's a much more interesting topic.
It took me about 10 weeks to finish the first draft of my very first story (80K), and I was working full time at that time, so I'd say it IS possible, but of course we're all individuals and work and write in different ways, so I'd take his advice for what it is: his personal opinions. He's not God, and what he says is by no means something that should be considered universal. It's based on his own convictions and experiences. Do whatever works for you and focus on actually finishing the story. After all, no one will give you an award for completing it within a certain time, and I doubt it that any publisher will be interested in knowing if it took you 10 weeks or 10 years. Only quality matters.
I'm encouraging answers with detail. How long does it take you to write 60K words. Describe the circumstances. Have you really ever written a 60K word piece? Or are you hypothesising about what it might be like to write 60K words? If you really have written 60K words, then you will have lots of detail about the experience. Those that have not, it seems, prefer to say "depends".
To me the most important part of the first draft is the narrative experience. I personally don't like writing new material unless I am inspired, and would never undertake an idea in the first place unless I was super inspired. As such, the first draft for me is more of a "channeling experience," where I try to get the magic down as much as possible. This requires me to just flow, and as a result, write really fast. Research for the first draft is only importance in so much as that the key elements are at least feasible, and that there are no massive plot holes. All other details which require research can be reserved for future drafts, where I am sober. "Three months," miraculously seems to be about the time I have until that inspiration wanes, and I was surprised to find King also said "three months."
No, he's just using the request for 'detail' as some kind of challenge intended to antagonize by questioning someone's (my) 'authority' to answer. 'If you don't provide detail you mustn't have done it, so how would you know?' Anyway, many of those who have written over 60k many times will say depends, because it is a correct, and in my view the only 'correct', answer. One that the OP clearly doesn't like. Nor does he like anyone criticizing his asinine question with a real, useful, and relevant answer.
Great response. I also do wonder if I don't complete this first draft soon that I'll run out of steam. Clearly there is a trade off between banging the words out and capturing the essence of your idea, clumsily even, just to get it down whilst still inspired.
No I haven't written anything close to 60K so I'm also interested what those who did has to say. I'm aware that it might not make sense for me as we are in different situations (job, kids, talent, etc) so having a few responses will not save the world. It seems several answers arrived already and there is a big dispersion. I did not expect that there will be a consensus on the three months King mentioned but seeing that many people spent years just to finish the first draft is surprising. I am a big planner, I can't just sit down and write without knowing where the story will go. I daydream a lot and plan every details, events, twists, setting, characters, etc in advance. Months/years can pass with planning, without writing a single word. Does this count? Or just the actual writing? I wonder if those who say it took years to finish the first draft spent this time mostly with planning or it's just they did not have time or inspiration to continue. I'm sure Stephen King has several stories revolving around in his head and he is adding more and more detail to them until he thinks one of them is mature enough to write it down as a novel. THEN he can write the first draft (let's say 120,000 words) in three months which is about 2000 words a day (not writing on weekends), about 250 words an hour (2000/8 hours) and 4 words a minute. This does not sound incredibly hard if you don't have anything else to do.
Hence my angst at hearing people repeatedly quote King as the do all, be all, end all of wisdom in writing. He Ain't It! This is not to say that he does not have some good points in his favor but every piece of writing advice he offers should be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes a hogshead!
He is a very prolific writer and thats the secret to some of his success. If you want to make money selling something you either need to find more people to buy it or offer more versions of it for people to re-purchase. For most authors, our best chance of making it is it produce quantity rather than spend years over quality. I have noticed that a lot of creatives arent very realistic about the potential rewards for their work. They want to spend forever producing one thing and then get paid a good whack for the hours they put in. My dad is the same. He paints, pretty well, and usually has his work in art galleries and some local shops but it doesnt sell because its over priced. They typically list it at around £900 - £1400 a painting and then eventually ask him to lower the price by 25% , he then withdraws his painting in a sulk and it sits in his studio with no one looking at it while he works on the next one. I talked to him about it and he explains that x amount divided by the hours it took to paint it is less than minimum wage and he cant sell it for less than that. In his head that is a completely reasonable argument and one he will never shift from. He really isnt thinking about who his customers might be or the benefits of just getting his work out there and selling. I find it very frustrating because he has enough pieces to really make a splash with all at once if he'd just be reasonable about what they will sell for.
I'm collaborating with a friend at the moment and it's been about 4 days and we have just over 10,000 words so far. Assuming we keep this up, we should have an 80k-word novel by Sep/Oct. We write roughly 1000-2000 words per day and alternate, then we send it to each other and we edit each other's parts. However, I'm on holiday at the moment so that explains why I have so much time and can stay up etc, whereas my friend's just crazy and stays up till 7am writing even though she has a full-time job. Otherwise, I managed an 80k-word manuscript in about 3-4 months in the past. But the reason it's not finished is because much of it didn't make sense and I had to rewrite this 3 times. Each time it took about 2-4 months to finish the writing process. But then again, I don't really suffer from any kind of self-doubt, so pounding out words isn't a problem for me. I do edit as I go on top of this. Besides, I write fantasy, which means while there's time poured into thinking etc, I don't have any research to do, which cuts the time by a chunk I'm sure. However, I've always been a very fast writer - at school I churned out a 13-paged handwritten essay in an English exam once. Each exam is about 60min long if I remember correctly.
Just out of curiosity, I checked the word count on my current WIP, on which I have been working since mid-January. It clocks in at 60,897 words. Of course I have not worked exclusively on this project throughout that time and, in addition to my writing, I have other irons in the fire. Also, I do a lot of fine tuning changing, removing large passages as I go when something happens 'here' that makes 'there' not work right... or at all. And, since continuity is of critical importance, especially in something like this work, I will go back and make changes or notes on changes immediately. In all fairness, I've probably written maybe 80k on this ms since I started. But I just keep 'disappearing' things. And it's not finished yet. I would rather 'write right' than fast.
I've done NaNoWriMo three times, and finished it once. That's 50K in a month. It was junk. To make it not-junk, but still just first-draft quality, I'd probably have to spend about three times the amount of time per word. So that means that theoretically I could write 60K in three months, yeah. But, again, I only finished it once. The other two times, fairly minor personal and work issues meant that I didn't have enough time to finish. So I think that for me, 60K of first-draft-quality words in six months might be realistic, assuming that I have a good idea, before I start, of where the novel is going. Edited to add: However, I overwrite. I suspect that I wouldn't write a 60K first draft and grow it to 100K. I'd more likely write a 200K-300K first draft and trim it to 100K.
I'm good for three pages, at 250 words per page in one day...but i don't write every day. 50,000 to 60,000 takes me a year.
Some days i can can crank out a thousand words a day, my record being around 1,400. Of course that's mostly poetry, but i feel like i'm in a major novel setback right now.
We're all different. There is no standard. I wrote out the rough draft of my duology, ~134,000 words, in about 6 weeks. I've been working on actually writing the first book for ~2.75 years now.
Did some adding, multiplying, and dividing and it seems based on the number of manuscript drafts, it'd take me 4 months to reach 60k, on average. Faster, if I didn't do some light editing at the same time, but nowadays it's pretty much a given that I don't just churn it out, I have to do some preliminary polishing. But this is probably not an entirely realistic estimate 'cause I just counted how much @T.Trian and I write together, and then halved that number. I'm not sure what this means. I'm just happy to take that 2-3 hours per day every day to work on our WIP. Sometimes the words come faster, sometimes one scene can take several days. Sometimes we write nothing new and just edit, although that does affect the word count (downsizes it... one hopes).
