How to Write First Drafts of Novels in Weeks or Months

Want to Write a Novel Within Weeks or Months? Read the Post Below and Get to Work!

I write first drafts quickly. Like, very quickly. On December 5, 2025, I completed an 81,000 word (268 page) first draft of a novel that I’d started on October 11, 2025.  That’s 53 days, or just over 7 weeks. Normally, before I share my drafts with my “beta readers," who are, for the most part, close, award-winning writers friends who also write novels and, because she will, my mother. I didn’t do that this time. This time I sort of knew the first draft was ready to be reviewed—sure, there are some typos and that sort of thing, but the continuity was there, which is why I write as quickly as I can—writing every day until a first draft is done almost always ensures your voice, your characters, your plot—everything—has a consistency to it. At least, it does for me. I have some advice for you on how to write first drafts of novels in weeks and months.

The shortest time it took me to write a first draft of a novel is three weeks. That’s writing all day every day, including weekends. I get that way sometimes, where I have a lot to say about some topic or other, and the stars align, writing-wise. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, it’s pretty special. It’s a magical feeling I get where I sit down, I start writing, and the writing does not stop. For anything. Not to watch a TV show or movie. Not to read a book. Not to do anything except write, maybe workout/go for a walk, and to take care of my children. Sometimes, I don’t even eat. That’s when I know that the writing has taken over (there is, however, always coffee. Always).

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And you can do the same thing. It doesn’t have to be as crazy as what I do. My friend, the writer and professor of creative writing, John Dufresne, has a book called Is Life Like This: A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months. It’s a great book—he’s much more eloquent than I am when it comes to the art of communicating the writing experience, tips and tricks, etc. If you’re just starting out and haven’t written a novel, or are even an experienced writer, I highly recommend it (and his other writing books as well).

But you can do it. The thing is, you have to want it. You have to break down any and all of the barriers that are preventing you from doing it. Forget that you have writer’s block (I actually don’t believe it exists. I always say it’s not that you can’t write, it’s that you can’t write what you want to write when you want to write it). Forget that you have a full-time job (I worked 50-70 hours a week, traveled for work, had/have 2 daughters, a dog, worked out, read, etc. and still wrote 2-4 hours a day, which I did by getting up at 3am and writing for 3-4 hours). Forget about going out to happy hours because your friends and colleagues beg you to). Forget that Christmas party, or that birthday party, or any other event that’s going to take you away from your writing desk. Sound harsh? A little militaristic? Well, sometimes you have to sacrifice certain things in order to achieve what you want to achieve. I’m not saying you can’t do any of those things once you’ve put in your writing time for the day. But if you haven’t? I wouldn’t. But that’s just me.

But Cully? You’ve only published one novel and a bunch of short stories and nonfiction. Yep. That’s true. I also have nine novels in various states of revision I believe publish-worthy once I’m done with them, including one novel I’ve revised over 100 times since 2002. I edit for a long time. A long time. Not on all novels, but most of them. My goal, if you’ve read previous posts on the subject, is not to make tons of money on my novels (though I wouldn’t mind if I did). My goal isn’t to kick out more than a novel a year. My goals is this: I want to write the best novel I can, which means a novel that people read, remember, and want to read more than once throughout their lives. I want to write literature that people will read in a hundred years because the themes are still relevant and the messages ones that resonate with my readers. I write literary fiction. Literary fiction doesn’t sell, or at least not like Fantasy, or Romance, or Science Fiction, or Thrillers, of Mysteries, or . . . you get the hint. But I enjoy reading literary fiction, and I enjoy writing literary fiction. I’ve written historical fiction, and I’ve written a crime novel, and commercial fiction, but I believe my strengths lie in literary fiction, primarily fiction that explores the complex and complicated lives of couples, of families in strife, of the difficulties of just being alive as humans who go to work and have families and children and extended family members who make life difficult (all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as Leo Tolstoy says in Anna Karenina). And that’s what I strive to accomplish in my fiction—the drama between my characters. No one wants to read about happy families and people: fiction is about learning about ourselves through the challenges our characters face in their fictive lives.

So, back to jamming through your first draft in weeks or months. Here’s how I do it:

I decide what tool I'll write with: pen/paper, MS Word, synonym finder (I use both MS Word's and Thesaurus.com, whatever. Then I sit down in the same place every day with a story in mind or without one. And I just start writing. Writing isn’t writing, it’s revising. Meaning you write a first draft to get the story down, whatever that story is, and you just go for it. Your job is to get the words on the page, or the screen, or whatever. If you write in crayon, cool. Just be able to read your writing. Whatever you do, don’t hesitate. Create that schedule, that minimum word count you need to get done, and do it every day. Period.

I don’t revise while I’m writing. Now, it would be a lie if I said I never correct anything. I correct typos, obviously, if I see them. For me, they’re pretty easy to notice—I use MS Word and so typos, for the most part, are underlined in red. But I don’t write a paragraph or a page and then revise the whole thing before moving on. That throws off my rhythm, and my rhythm is the most important thing here. Racing through a first draft keeps the musicality of the narrative going. The voice remains. The ball is rolling down the hill, and it’s going faster, and maybe it’s a snowball gathering more snow (in this case, more pages and words), and that’s what I want—to create something, a first draft, so I have something to work on later.

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I start to understand what the novel may be about. I don’t necessarily know exactly what the novel will be about, because that’s not the point of my first draft. The point is to get it down. Because once I have that first draft, I’ll now know, sort of, where I want to go with it. I’ll know the characters that have jumped on stage to interview for my little written play, and I’ll know which ones of them are weak, and which ones of them are sticking around, at least for the time being. I’ll know who the lead character(s) are, and who the secondary characters are, and who the stick figures are that may/or may not be killed off (in the sense of killing your darlings rather than actually “murdering” them). And this is where the fun begins (or, for a lot of people, sometimes including myself, where the torture begins). Because the next step is revision.

When I begin revising a novel, it’s usually after I write another novel or revise another novel that I’ve previously written. By putting my first draft away for a while, I give myself distance. I allow myself the ability to step back a little bit so that I can read my first draft the way someone else might: with a fresh perspective. When I start editing and rewriting and revising a novel, if I haven’t already done so while writing, I’ll start an outline. Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and so on. Breaking down your novel into bite size chunks does a couple of things. One, it gives you manageable/non-overwhelming pieces to focus on while you’re editing. That allows you to get the words right, to hone down what you’re trying to do with that sentence, that paragraph, that chapter. I don’t outline when I start out (I’m a pantser rather than a plotter), because I enjoy the journey I’m setting out on without any preconceived notion of the events that need happen. So, that’s my advice. Take it or leave it. You may find that you’re better just jumping right back in to start the revision process.

These are the Steps I Use to Write the First Drafts of My Novels Within Weeks or Months

When I return to the first draft of a novel to begin the revision process, I get my outline doc ready. Name at the top of the Word doc, Chapter 1 heading, and save the file as v.1.date, so that I know what round I’m in revision-wise, when I started the revision, etc. You can save it however you’d like. But I try to be consistent so that, if something happens to one of my versions, I’ll have another version. I outline each chapter, meaning as I’m reading, I write the key events in each chapter, as I currently have them written. I don’t just use one document. Then I save these revisions into a folder or multiple folders where I can find them easily. I also, though not always, create a new document titled NameofNovel.Notes.Date. This is where I write whatever I need to write to remember things. Character names, ages, familial relations, what they look like, their motivations, whatever. I try to capitalize or bold the names and important events associated with the characters or the chapters. This last novel I wrote, I alternated between a husband and a wife. I put their names before each chapter, and in my outline I could easily refer back to what happened in his or her previous chapter. Remember, consistency/causality, i.e., this happens and so this happens, etc. The queen dies and then the king dies of grief. The king doesn’t just die because the queen did. The gist here is to make sure you know what’s going on throughout the novel so you can improve it.

Figure out what the novel is about, and whose story it is, and focus on that. It’s a piece of clay: you focus on what you’re creating. Decide who stays and who goes. We writers call this “killing your darlings.” It doesn’t just apply to characters who don’t hold their weight/don’t add anything to the plot/novel. It can apply to sentences. To paragraphs. To entire chapters. To half of your novel, even. My MFA thesis was/is the novel that I’ve been revising/rewriting since 2002. It’s about a WWII bomber pilot. My thesis advisor asked what I thought about removing all the WWII stuff that I’d spent thousands of hours researching, including interviewing a WWII bomber pilot. I tried it. It worked. The point is to be open to throwing stuff out that doesn’t need to be in your novel. This, and much of the above, obviously applies to the work on your first novel after you’ve already completed it. But so way. You’re here to learn. To get the motivation to jam out on that first draft. To push yourself up that hill. Everything that helps matters. But don’t ever be afraid to throw something to the curb if it’s not adding to your novel, if it’s not showing character or advancing the plot or helping your novel. You can use it later. As my teenager says, “Trust.”

The last step is to revise, revise, revise. Or maybe share it with some “beta readers” that you trust to give it to you straight. Listen to them. Don’t listen to them. But just hear them out. They may have some information/constructive criticism that’ll help you get truckin’. And then start revising. As I mentioned above, I take chunks—chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and I try to improve them. I may go back and edit later (actually, it happens 99% of the time), and that’s okay. Writing a novel isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. That line's a cliché, of course. Make sure you’re editing out any clichés you may have in there. Or create your own aphorism instead of using someone else’s.

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Now, of course, I’ve lied a little up above. Just little white lies, don’t fret. Or do. Whatever. Everything I do when I write is . . . flexible. I change things up sometimes when I feel it’s right to do so. Sometimes I know what I’m writing is crap, and so I’ll just X it out and begin anew. Sometimes I’ll kill off a character because she or he isn’t going anywhere and if they were, it’d be off the first cliff I’d throw before them. Maybe I’ll change the beginning to something new and toss what I’ve started. All you need to be concerned about is that you’re writing, and that you’re writing with purpose, and that purpose is to get the words down so you have a first draft to then work on later. That’s it. So, if I were you, I’d challenge myself to doing what I’ve mentioned above. It works for me, maybe it’ll work for you. See if you can do it. Nothing beats a failure like a try. (Another cliché). But it’s true.

Cully Perlman is author of the novel, THE LOSSES.

Cully Perlman is Author of the Novel THE LOSSES

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