Do Good (First) Books Take Longer to Write?

[Rizla]

Personally, I think so. I imagine the process gets faster the more books a writer writes, so I would like to focus mainly on first novels.

The Hobbit was published in 1927 was Tolkien was writing the back story (which became The Silmarillion) in the trenches in WW1, so it must have taken 10 years or more. Tolkien spent another 16 years writing The Lord of the Rings!

Another is the first Harry Potter book. She got the idea in 1990 and published it in 7 years, so about 6 years.

[gmw]

You've picked a couple of BIG ones as examples, and both these are obviously big projects - I think they'd have taken a long time regardless. Plus there's a long lead time in finding a publisher.

There can be a long time between idea and a productive start on a novel. And work on the book doesn't really stop until until it's published, but how much work is done in that phase varies a lot. So what is the right measure for how long a book takes to write?

Get a publisher, become even moderately successful, and you can afford to spend more time writing. The find-a-publisher-and-editor lead time is gone, and so things appear to take less time ... maybe.

And there are examples of authors where the subsequent books also take a long time. Stephen Donaldson says Lord Foul's Bane took nine months to write (but that doesn't include the two and a half years of rejections and then the lengthy editorial process). The last chronicles he cites as having been in his mind for 25 years! I haven't tried to keep up, but I get the impression George Martin doesn't get much faster.

I'm not even sure you can reliably say that "good books take longer to write" (without the "first" qualifier). From Wikipedia about Michael Moorcock we get:

Most of Moorcock's earlier work consisted of short stories and relatively brief novels: he has mentioned that "I could write 15,000 words a day and gave myself three days a volume. That's how, for instance, the Hawkmoon books were written."

and despite this speed he has produced some very good books (and some it's probably more polite for me to not to comment on ).

It's all author and project dependent - not to mention the reader's tastes that dictate whether they think it was "good".

[eschwartz]

And Tolkien is not a proof to anything -- obviously the backstory had to be completed first, and you are counting that with the first book!

LotR was just an excuse for him to make up a whole world history.

[crich70]

I think any 1st creating act takes longer because you don't know your way around things yet. And as far as Tolkien and Rowling they had other things going on as well. Tolkien was a professor of languages and Ms. Rowling had to deal with her (then) infant daughter. As I understand it she would push her daughter's stroller around and when the baby dozed she would sit in her bil's coffee house and write until the child woke again. Real life can slow a person down in new creative pursuits faster than anything.

[cromag]

The two examples you've chosen are series. In the first book of a series you have to come up with characters, settings, backstories, etc., plus the story. For the remaining books in the series you have an established base to build on.

For someone who writes non-series novels, the second, third, etc., books probably reflect an increasing skill level, so I imagine they'd still be a little faster for the writer to produce, but I couldn't prove it.

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

And Tolkien is not a proof to anything -- obviously the backstory had to be completed first, and you are counting that with the first book!

LotR was just an excuse for him to make up a whole world history.

The first book required the backstory. That was part of writing the first book and what made it a great book.

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by cromag

The two examples you've chosen are series. In the first book of a series you have to come up with characters, settings, backstories, etc., plus the story. For the remaining books in the series you have an established base to build on.

For someone who writes non-series novels, the second, third, etc., books probably reflect an increasing skill level, so I imagine they'd still be a little faster for the writer to produce, but I couldn't prove it.

Same point again really. The first book required a lot of development to make it good. The fact she wrote more books after I don't see as relevant.

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by crich70

I think any 1st creating act takes longer because you don't know your way around things yet. And as far as Tolkien and Rowling they had other things going on as well.

Who doesn't?

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Rizla

Who doesn't?

True. My point was that very few people can afford to give all their time and effort to just creating something. At least when they are just starting out. And many authors (from what I understand) aren't so well paid by their efforts that they can afford to quit their day jobs either. The author who makes $10,000.000 dollar advances is more a dream than a reality for most. And if they have a family that also takes some time away from writing I imagine as well. Plus most of us need time to eat, sleep and take care of the other minutia of daily life as well.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Rizla

Same point again really. The first book required a lot of development to make it good. The fact she wrote more books after I don't see as relevant.

The subsequent books weren't just add ons, the series describes a much larger story arc that was planned from the outset. To my tastes the first Harry Potter book wasn't anything particularly special. If that's all there had been it would have been an amusing book for young readers and not much more. It is the larger story and subsequent books that turn this collection into something special.

Which, again, begs the question of my earlier post: How do you measure how long books take to write? If you include the planning that went into the larger story arc before the first book was finished, and then all the ongoing touch-up and adjustments to the larger story that must have happened as the subsequent books were written, then the last Harry Potter book took by far the longest to write.

[Rizla]

How long did the last one take?

[Nancy Fulda]

I don't think this is the sort of statement one can categorically accept or deny. Some books go fast; others don't. And it's just as possible to over-revise an otherwise good book as it is to rush it out the door without proper polishing.

It would be interesting to see a statistic correlating (for example) major award nominations or Amazon bestseller status with the amount of time the author spent working on the project.

[gbm]

This is what I think is more of the typical way it happens.

My First Sale by Lois McMaster Bujold, She Got By with...

bernie

[EricPonvelle]

I think the modern era of publishing will change the paradigm that "it takes a long time to write a good book." I am of the opinion that publishers made us miss out a lot of good works for arbitrary reasons. Take Lovecraft. Other than Weird Tales and a few journals, he wasn't a very well received author in the publishing community. He kept writing regardless, but I'd like to imagine in a digital world where he could have said "Oh, well, time to post it myself," Lovecraft would be discovered.

Nevermind the fact that some of the biggest book successes aren't particularly well written or good (see "50 Shades of Grey" which started out as Fanfiction); they just hit that sweet spot that people want.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Rizla

How long did the last one take?

As I said, it depends on how you measure it. If the last book was part of the original idea (and, in at least some part, I think it was) then if the idea was in 1990 and the last book was published in 2007 that's 17 years. If you just measure the final writing and publishing time then it's somewhere around 2 years (working off the publication dates).

All series, even ones that are less of a single story arc than the Harry Potter books, are really difficult to measure because every book along the way lends something to the work that comes after. And I intend this from a writing perspective, not just a reader's perspective. The story keeps refining as it is being written (at least that's the way it works for me), so that writing the earlier books really is part of being able to write the later books.