When I first started writing with serious intent, I didn’t focus on getting the story finished so much as I focused on getting writing done.  This worked, and stories followed. The more I wrote, the better I got.

Then I finished a book in (roughly) a calendar month. This was a great thing, and a terrible thing… because the first time it happened, I immediately moved the goalposts to “I did it once, I should be able to repeat that on command.” That’s not the way skill-building works, and so I stumbled and fell flat on my face until I’d learned my lesson.

Then I finished a second book in thirty writing days. (No, it wasn’t the next book, or even the third one.) By this point, I was keeping track of what I was writing by putting stickers up on the wall calendar for the days I’d successfully written something… and I noticed that I can write a book in 30-90 writing days. (The last book was actually 82 writing days.)

The problem is that they’re not consecutive days.

The faster I write, the more of the book I cover – the slower I write, the fewer words or progress comes. But that’s not saying writing every day would always make more progress: some of the slowdowns come from research, and/or tackling a hard part of the book. Some came from getting sick, or surgery, and there was no creativity going to come with that.

What determines a 30-day book vs. an 82 day book? Well, for one, the 30-day books tend to be shorter, and I tend to have already done a large chunk of worldbuilding already. (Sometimes that’s in stories you see, sometimes that’s in prior snippets that never went anywhere.) The longer writing times tend to be for longer books, with more characters (and therefore more character arcs) and I’m having to worldbuild as I go. They also tend to be in times of lighter workload from Day Job, and usually periods of relatively good health in the household.

All that said, I know better than to expect that I can sit down and demand my brain write This Exact Story, in This Exact Timeframe. Maybe I’ll get there in another five or six books… and maybe I won’t. I’ll be a different person, with a different skill level, by then.

How many writing days does it take for you to finish a story, and what affects that for you?