Stephen King summed it up – it should take you 90 days to write and complete a novel.
Now, there’s rewrites and editing. That should really take another two months.
If you’ve spent 11 years on a novel, it needs to have a word count of 6,693,005 words! There’s no reason it should take you that long to write a novel.
If you’ve been working on it that long, there’s a fundamental problem somewhere, and that’s what I’m trying to fix.
Sometimes novels are broken. My first novel has serious structural issues, and it’s taking a LONG time to fix that. It would be nice if a publisher would look at that and just say, “well, you’re such a nice guy, we’ll just buy it as it is and release it. But don’t do it again!”
The solution is, get distance from it. Write something else in the meantime.
After you’ve got distance from it, and you read it and don’t know every word, then you can do a major cover-to-cover rewrite on it. That’s probably what I need, but I’m really dragging my feet on the inevitable.
How many novels can you do in a year? Four is the maximum. There are several authors who keep up a pace like that. Heinlein used to, back when books sold for twenty cents. I used to haunt a bookstore in New England where the policy on paperbacks was you paid what the cover price was. I was seriously scoring a lot of Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein books for ten dollars!
Of course, I also paid $80 for a book on music there.
I’m digressing.
But the easy solution is this. you should be able to – in one year – write, edit, rewrite and release – one book a year. The most you can manage is four. So, that’s your goal.
Between one and four books a year!
What gets scheduled, gets done.
