The honest answer is that a first draft takes as long as it takes, and the honest answer is useless, because an open-ended project is the easiest kind to abandon. What you actually need is not the true number but a workable one: a target close enough to real that you can plan around it and finish.
Do the arithmetic once. Words you want, divided by words you can write on an ordinary day, times roughly 1.4 for the days life gets in the way. That number is your draft.
Start from your own daily number, not someone else's
Write on four ordinary days — not your best days, not a weekend when the house is empty — and see what comes out. Most people land somewhere between 300 and 1,000 words in a session of under an hour. That is your real rate, and it is the only one worth planning with.
Now take your target length. A short novel is around 60,000 words; a standard one is 80,000 to 100,000. If you are not sure what yours should be, how many words is a novel lays out the ranges by category. At 500 words a day, 80,000 words is 160 writing days. Add the padding for illness, work, travel and flat weeks and you get roughly seven to eight months.
That is a completely normal first draft. If the number startles you, it is because the three-week stories are the ones that get repeated — not because they are typical.
The ranges people actually finish in
One to two months is possible at 1,500 to 2,000 words a day, and it works best when you know the shape of the story in advance. It is also the pace most likely to collapse if anything in your life changes.
Three to six months is the sweet spot for most people writing around a job: a few hundred words on weekdays, a longer session at the weekend. Fast enough to stay inside the story, slow enough to survive a bad fortnight.
Six to twelve months is the common timeline for a longer book or a complicated one, and there is nothing wrong with it. Past about eighteen months the risk changes character: you are no longer the same writer who started, and the early chapters begin to feel like someone else wrote them.
Deadlines work better in weeks than in months
"Finish by summer" is not a deadline, it is a wish; nothing about it tells you what today requires. Convert it. Decide the week you want to be done, divide the remaining words by the remaining weeks, and track the week rather than the day. Weekly targets absorb a lost Tuesday without turning it into failure, and failure on day three is how most drafts die.
If you write in concentrated bursts rather than daily increments, the arithmetic still holds — you are just filling it in a different rhythm, which we compare in writing every day vs writing in bursts.
Speed is mostly a decision about rewriting
The single biggest drag on a first draft is editing while you write it. Rereading chapter one for the ninth time feels productive and produces nothing; you cannot judge an opening before you know what it opens into. Leave a note in brackets and keep going. The draft exists to tell you what the book is. Fixing it is a separate job, and how to edit your own writing is about that second pass.
The second biggest drag is not knowing what the next scene is. You do not need a full outline, but you do need to finish each session knowing where the next one starts — a single line is enough. If you keep stalling on that, outlining vs writing without a plan covers both ways of solving it.
When a draft is genuinely taking too long
Length is not the symptom. These are: the word count has not moved in a month, you are rewriting instead of advancing, you no longer know what the story is about, or you have started a new idea in another file and keep thinking about that one. None of those are solved by more time, and most are solved by writing badly and forwards for two weeks — the approach behind how to overcome writer's block.
Or stop writing in private
Deadlines you set alone are the easiest ones to move. Deadlines with readers attached are much harder, which is why serialising works for so many first-time writers: you publish a chapter, a few people read it, and next week exists whether you feel inspired or not. We make Arwy, an Android app for publishing a story chapter by chapter, and that external rhythm is most of what it is good for.
It is the wrong tool if your book only works read whole — a tightly plotted thriller whose structure depends on the reader reaching the end quickly, say — or if you would rather not show anyone a sentence until the manuscript is finished. Plenty of good books are written that way. If that is you, keep the spreadsheet and the weekly number; they do the same job quietly.
Writing your first draft? Publishing it chapter by chapter gives you readers while you work. Arwy is on Google Play.