“Beats me.”
That was my standard reply when a prospective book coaching client asked me how long it would take to write their book. I wasn’t being a smartmouth; I didn’t know. It seemed that every book project and every author was different, and there were a lot of variables to consider.
Writing a book is a complex project with many moving parts. Plus, figuring out how long it will take in advance is more challenging because there are so many definitions of “write a book.”
What Does It Mean To Write a Book?
Poke around on the Internet for a while, and you’ll find many people talking about writing a book. Many avoid messy details altogether. Very often, comparing their estimates seems like comparing apples to race cars. When some guru or course promises to show you how to “write a book in a weekend,” they probably mean create a first draft. Since all first drafts are pretty bad, writing a book you can be proud of will take more than one draft. All great writing is iterative.
For me, writing a book means creating a document that’s ready to enter the publishing process. That usually means some research, three or four full drafts, and a professional edit.
Even if we agree on what it means to write a book, we must examine the assumptions behind estimates of the time it takes.
What Do You Assume?
People who put together estimates of how long it will take to write a book usually have some assumptions behind those estimates. How many words will you be able to write per hour? How many hours per day will you write? How many days of the week will you write?
One estimate I found on the web suggests that you can write a first draft in about nine weeks. To achieve that, you will write 1000 words a day, six days a week. If you do one round of revisions and have a professional edit, the final estimate is that it will take you five to six months to write a 50,000-word manuscript.
That’s very logical, but is it reasonable? Not for most of the people I worked with. My clients don’t have full time to devote to writing. They’ve got a day job, and it’s usually pretty demanding. They’ve got families and friends and social obligations.
For most people, good writing requires large blocks of time, 90 to 120 minutes in most cases. Every author faces the challenge of finding as many of those blocks as possible. It’s the biggest challenge for authors who are working full-time on something other than their book. Most of my clients manage one or maybe two productive writing sessions per week. Their life is already full when they add writing a book to it. Finding time is hard. And, of course, life intervenes.
We Plan, God Laughs
The universe always gets a vote. You may know that you can write 500 words a day and count on writing five days a week, but you’ll find that won’t work some weeks.
Your long-lost cousin, Horatio, will come to town one week, and you must show him around. Another week, you’ll get that stomach flu that’s been going around, and you won’t be able to do any work. Maybe you scheduled an interview with an important source, but suddenly, she needs to go out of the country on a business emergency, and the next time you can get together is a month from now.
Is it even possible to come up with a reasonable estimate? Fortunately, the answer is yes.
Reference Class Forecasting
Reference class forecasting is a technique that predicts the outcome of a project, like writing a book, based on the actual outcomes in a reference class of similar projects. Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner describe why it works in their book How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between.
“Most people think that unknown unknowns cannot be forecasted, and that sounds reasonable. But the data for the projects in the reference class reflect everything that happened to those projects, including any unknown unknown surprises. We may not know precisely what those events were. And we may not know how big or how damaging they were. But we don’t need to know any of that. All we need to know is that the numbers for the reference class do reflect how common and how big the unknown unknowns really were for those projects, which means that your forecast will reflect those facts, too.”
Your challenge is to define the reference class. Find authors like you who wrote books similar to what you intend to write. Or you can use the shortcut: a writing coach probably works with similar authors and projects and can give you an estimate based on their experience.
So, if you want to know how long your book will take, don’t over-complicate or attempt to guess the future. And don’t expect things to go according to plan.
More than 150 years ago, Helmut von Moltke reminded military leaders that “no plan survives the first contact with the enemy.” More modern, non-military versions include “No plan survives the first contact with reality” and “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Your plan is fragile. You won’t be able to anticipate everything. And the universe gets a vote.
