First Draft Finish Line: What’s Your Speed?

How long should it take you to write the first draft of a novel? There’s no right answer, really, but as both a writer of novels and a former editor of authors who write novels, I’ve identified three categories that most writers fall into (more or less). This is all ballpark math, but it might be helpful to folks thinking about tackling that first novel.

Before I get into the details, let’s talk ground rules. I’ll be using daily word count (DWC) goals to measure writing speed in conjunction with...