The common consensus seems to be that it takes years to write a book. But I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t. Really it can be done in months or less.

How can you write a book in a month? To make things easier on yourself, plan your book out ahead of time and outline your basic plot before you start. Then it’s just a matter of consistently showing up every day and writing a substantial amount of words to push your book further toward completion.

In this article, I’ll explain how long it takes to write a book. As well as two different approaches I would use for attempting to write a book in a month.

How Long Does It Take To Write A Book?

You might think that writing a book takes years, but I disagree.

I’ve written 10,000 word ebooks in a single day. And you can apply the same ideas and practices that I followed to full-length novels as well.

The truth is that it takes most people a year or more to write a book because they aren’t disciplined about it. Maybe they sit down to write one day a week for a couple of hours. So they end up only getting a few hundred words down at a time.

How To Write A Book Fast

I would like to propose two strategies for writing a book in about a month.

Easy Mode

What I call easy mode is typically what you’d think of as Nanowrimo. Your plan should be to write about 75,000 words in a month.

But you only have to do the writing part during that month. You can plan out your entire plot beforehand. So feel free to lay out the basics of each chapter in advance. Work out the details about all of your characters and everything else you’ll need for your story ahead of time too.

Then when the month to write your book comes, all you have to do is sit down and write. Planning ahead means you won’t need to waste time on plotting and figuring out where you want the story to go. So your brain will be more freed up to write dialogue and actually make your story come to life.

At the end of the month, your book won’t be ready to publish right away. But you’ll have a complete first draft.

Read my article How To Write A Blog Post or Article FAST! and learn how you can boost your writing speed.

How to do it:

To write 75,000 words in a month, you’ll need to write 3,750 words per day if you’re only writing on weekdays.

Personally I recommend also writing on weekends just to keep yourself in the flow of things. Even if you cut back to only writing 1,000 words or so on the weekend.

If you write seven days a week for the entire month, then you’ll only need to write 2,678 words per day.

If you’ve never written something of this size before, you’re probably going to struggle toward the end no matter what you choose. But I think these goals provide a pretty good sweet spot to aim for.

Getting started each day is hard, and then once you get past a certain word count you’ll probably run out of steam and it will get harder too. But if you write a little bit each day, it’s easy once you’ve got a routine going.

Hard Mode

If you follow my hard mode plan, you’ll write 100,000 words in a month. That will also include all of the planning and editing too. So at the end of 30 days, you should have a finished book that’s almost ready to publish.

How to do it:

To finish your book in a month on hard mode, you’ll realistically need to set a full week aside for planning, editing, and formatting. So then you’ve really only got three weeks left to write your 100,000 words.

That’s 6,700 words if you only write on weekdays, or 4,800 words a day if you write every day for the entire month.

That’s a lot, but you can definitely do it once or twice a year and then take some time to recover in between. Even if you work really hard for two months a year and take the rest of the year off from writing, you’ll still have two completed novels to show for it!

Trying to write this way isn’t for brand new writers. I definitely don’t recommend going into it cold. You’ll want to start building up your writing stamina and developing a writing habit in the month leading up to it.

Could you publish a book in your spare time? My article How To Start Writing With A Busy Schedule or Full-time Job will help you out!

Pantser vs Plotter: The Different Types of Writers

There are two main categories of writers, pantsers or plotters.

Depending on which category you relate to, your writing strategy may be wildly different.

A panster is someone who can just sit down in front of a blank page and start writing, literally “by the seat of their pants.”

A plotter is someone who needs to plot things out in advance and have a basic idea of what’s going to happen in each chapter of their story. Plotters can range from very loose plotting, all the way up to complete control freaks who need to have every single detail worked out in advance.

One isn’t necessarily better than the other or more right. It’s just whatever works best for you.

Personally I always thought that I was a pantser. But then I realized that I was starting all of these stories and never actually finishing them.

So I gave plotting a try, and I found it was a lot easier to actually finish stories that way. So don’t be afraid to switch from one to the other.

For plotting, I Recommend following Derek Murphy’s plot dot.

You can also look into the idea of the Hero’s Journey as explained by Joseph Cambell. If you start to look into it, you’ll realize that most stories out there from Star Wars to Game of Thrones all follow this basic story archetype for the most part.

Once you know what the pattern is, it’s easy to slot in specific customizations for your story. Why try to recreate storytelling entirely when there’s already a proven formula?

If you do decide to follow the plot dot, I would start your plotting by giving a brief description of each chapter on the plot dot. Then you should have a basic skeleton of a story, including all of the main events and plot twists. Then when you sit down to write, all you have to do is fill in the details.

Conclusion

When it comes to writing a book in a month, there aren’t necessarily any secret hacks to make it super easy for you. There are some things that you can do to streamline the process and make your time as efficient and productive as possible. But beyond that, you just have to put in the work.

You’ll need to find ways to be motivated and disciplined, whatever that means for you.

And once your book is completed, I highly recommend rewarding yourself at the end. Your wrists and hands will hurt, and probably your brain too. So take a well deserved break for yourself.