: How long should it take to Revise/Edit to get to Good Enough? Editing, to focus my question a bit. My goal is to turn a book around from concept to publishable in a 2 year time period.

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I personally would NOT recommend writing a second book while revising the first. It is important to keep the first book in your head as a whole, a second book in my head would result in a jumbled and useless edit due to forgotten or mistaken plot threads and characters.

Pro writers that do a book a year do it raw start to final finish. Multi-tasking doesn't save you any time or make you type faster, it just reduces the quality of your work on both things. If you have 2000 hours in a year to write, spending 25% on revision and 75% on writing means you can't finish a book in a year that takes 2000 hours to write!

Also, give your group one chapter to read, and get feedback, and revise it, and give them the revision, and get feedback, and revise it.

If you are worried about the character arcs and plots, write what Hollywood calls a "treatment" of your novel. A screenplay in Hollywood is typically 110 pages or so. A treatment is a 3-5 page summary of every plot line and character arc, not written as either prose or an outline, but a kind of summary of each scene the screenwriter envisions, so it reads like a "just the facts" short story. It gives all the main beats of the story and does reveal any twists or surprises and the ending. It seldom includes any dialogue, except perhaps iconic lines: "I'll be back."

You can see that this is around 3.5% of the finished page count, so similarly, try writing for your 200K words a 7000 word treatment of your entire story. Go through all your scenes, count them, and divide 7000 words by the number of scenes you have. Devote that many words to the beats (an important point) in each scene, as part of the short story of your novel.

That treatment can be used to help you identify problems in the plot or characters, or identify scenes that are worthless, and your summary of what the scene does can be your guide to rewriting that scene: you know what it is supposed to accomplish so you can better cut the fat.

In your summary, look for repetition (unnecessary) and opportunities to combine partially matching scenes into a single scene, reducing word count.

In any case, revise your treatment to tell the same story in about 3500 words.

THEN give the revised treatment to your group; hopefully you can reduce it to 3000 or 4000 words, as it should be for a novel. Tell them what it is and get critiques on that, for the plot and characters, since they should be revealed by the treatment.

Use the feedback on a representative chapter as your lessons in actually writing prose and dialogue better, and use the feedback on the treatment as your lessons in plotting and story structure and character development.

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Even if you're thinking of this as primarily a learning project, I would advise trying to get it into publishable shape rather than abandoning it and starting a new one. As you said, it's work you'll need to learn to do sooner or later. Given that, however, I'd say you'll want to be a little less rigid and formulaic in your revision expectations. You're starting with plenty of raw material, so I'd recommend "rewriting" by first editing down to a tightly plotted core, and then filling in any remaining gaps. (Note: I found this revision plan by following links from @DPT 's answer, but it seems excellent to me.)

As far as when to stop the revisions, my advice is to rewrite until either a) you think the book is publishable or b) your revisions are not making it any better (for instance, if your new rewrites are undoing old ones, or if you've reworked so much, you've lost the original work). If you're not sure, and an arbitrary timeline helps you, go with it. After that, however, try to publish. You won't really know if you're done or not until you see if someone will publish it.

Two years total, one for writing, one for rewriting, sounds completely reasonable to me. Once you know yourself better, your estimates will improve. It's hard to give more exact numbers given that some successful authors (Jack Kerouac) hardly revise at all, while others (Orson Scott Card) continue revising years after publication. I would suggest, however, that you conceptualize "writing" as including the revisions (unless you want to end up with an endless supply of unpublishable first drafts). In addition to the psychological shift, this also encompasses the reality that some people write quick first drafts, and need more revision time, while others write more slowly but revise less.

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"How long should the revision process take"

Answer : Variable, and Henry has identified factors that impact it. I'll put my experience at the end. Note: I've heard the words 'editing' and 'revising' used in various ways. I consider edits to be a subset of revisions.

A few more metrics, some of which line up with Henry's answer can be found at this website :

There is no set answer with regard to how long revisions should take. Some writers, such as Holly Lisle, claim that you can revise a 125,000 novel in two weeks (This floored me, but check out her suggested revision process – it is really useful). However in reading further, I found that others did not spend significantly more time revising with other suggestions ranging from a month to two months. Nevertheless, one suggestion was that the revisions should take 80% of the total writing time.

One blogger suggested looking at the length of time it takes for
professional writers to write novels and noted that the majority of
writers produce new books every 2 to 3 years and observed that most of
them probably write full time. Thus it is likely that they spend at
least a portion of this time revising – I am going to assume at least
6 months.

And here is a method for revising, if you haven't developed/planned your own. You may not need a plan, and it sounds like you already have one anyway.

My experience, FWIW. (first attempt at writing fiction):

(1) Plotted and pounded out the first bad draft in eight weeks (last July - September.).

(2) I had twelve planned, dedicated revisions. Examples: Check every instance of passive voice and see if it is better in active voice. Check adverb abuse. Check point of view. Add setting. Distinguish character voice. Tighten. Hammer MC to a moral arc. Add a subplot so that every chapter moves the story. (I'm currently mapping each scene to scene-sequel model).

(3) Gave it to family in ~November/December, who caught a few items but generally supported the story. At that point I felt good enough about it. Things seemed smoothed out, and tightened, and everything worked well enough. It was a story.

(4) Gave it to betas, and they needed a month with it. I've gotten their comments back and ... this will require more time than I expected. They don't like a few of the characters. The upshot of this - I'm taking scenes apart, throwing scenes out, writing new scenes, adding new motivations and flaws. It sends me back a few steps because, for example, giving a character an alcohol problem (to make him more complex, flawed, less paragon) has ripple effects everywhere. The consistency and plot holes will creep back in.

I still hope to query by the end of May. But Henry's right - sticking too firmly to a schedule can impact the quality. I think you know that.

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Writer opinions on the importance of the revision process vary dramatically. Professionally trained journalists tend to "try to get it right during the first draft" by following rules which organize each scene's (story) points in descending order of importance. More organic writers tend embrace revision as part of the creation process, finishing a first draft quickly, then experimenting with pov changes, structural rearrangements and word cutting for as long as it takes to "get it right". The process by which a first draft is created also influences the revision process. Plotting writers probably need less structural revision than seat-of-the-pants'ers. Even the experience of the author comes into play. Writing a sequel is significantly easier and quicker than writing the initial story, because the sequel's writing voice and style have already been chosen.

All of these factors explain why there is no easy answer to your question. I personally prefer to be revision-heavy (almost to a fault). I believe that there is a point of diminishing returns, but almost every work-in-progress can benefit from careful revision. I usually allow myself no more than two times the first draft writing time for revisions. If I can't make it right in that amount of time, then I am probably not yet ready to write it. Throw it in the trunk and let it marinate for a year or two before trying to revise it again.

It is wonderful to set goals for yourself, and there is no arguing that prolific writers have a marketing advantage over prodding perfectionists. But setting an arbitrary deadline like one book per year is missing the point. For a starting writer, it is far better to produce a single, polished and marketable initial work, no matter how long it takes. Better to become know for something excellent than just another unknown contributor to the rejects pile.

Once your first gem has been produced and successfully sold, you can pound out annual sequels to your heart's (and pocketbook's) content. The potential length of your mouse's long-tale, depends heavily on the quality of the mouse which leads it.

Keep Writing!

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