We published a book last year that took its author eleven years to write. Eleven years. That’s longer than most marriages, longer than the entire run of some television series, longer than some of our interns have been alive. When I tell people this, their first reaction is usually disbelief, followed by something like, “What was wrong with it?” Nothing was wrong with it. Some books just take that long. And the reasons are more varied and more interesting than you might expect.

I want to talk about why some books take a decade or more to finish, because I think the popular image of the writer, hunched over a laptop, producing a novel in a year or two, doesn’t reflect reality for a lot of authors. The best-known version of this myth involves National Novel Writing Month, where participants write 50,000 words in November. I have nothing against NaNoWriMo; it’s gotten a lot of people started, and starting is the hardest part. But it also creates the impression that a novel is something you can produce in thirty days if you’re disciplined enough. The reality is that 50,000 words of first-draft prose, written at speed, is the beginning of a process, not the end of one.

Let me walk through some of the reasons books take years. The first, and most common, is that the author has a life. Most writers are not full-time writers. They have jobs, families, mortgages, aging parents, health problems, community obligations. Writing happens in the margins: early mornings before the kids wake up, late nights after the dishes are done, weekends when there’s nothing else pressing. A writer who can produce 500 words a day, five days a week, is doing well. At that pace, a 90,000-word first draft takes about nine months. But nobody writes 500 words a day, five days a week, for nine months straight. Life interrupts. The car breaks down. A parent gets sick. Work demands overtime. A week goes by without writing, then two, then a month. The momentum stalls and it takes days or weeks to rebuild. This is how a nine-month first draft becomes a two-year first draft. And then you have to revise.

The author of our eleven-year book was a high school teacher. She wrote during summers, on weekends, during planning periods when her grading was caught up. She told me once that her most productive year was the one she had a medical leave, six weeks off for a surgery, during which she wrote nearly a third of the book. She didn’t wish for another surgery, but she did wish for time, which is the one resource that every working writer craves and almost none of them have enough of.

The second reason books take years is structural complexity. Some stories are technically difficult to tell. A novel with multiple timelines, a narrative that moves between countries and decades, a story told from six different perspectives: these are engineering problems as much as creative ones. Getting the structure right can take years of experimentation, of writing a draft, realizing the structure doesn’t work, and starting over with a different approach. I know a writer who wrote the same novel from three different points of view before settling on the one that made the story work. Each version took about a year. That’s three years of work, two of which produced drafts that were ultimately abandoned.

This is something non-writers rarely understand: abandoned drafts are not wasted time. They’re research. A writer who discovers that a first-person narration doesn’t work for their story has learned something valuable, and that knowledge makes the next draft better. But the emotional cost is real. Throwing away a year’s worth of writing is painful, even when you know it’s necessary. It takes courage to start over, and many writers put off that decision for months or years, tinkering with a broken structure instead of admitting it needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

The third reason is research. Some books require an enormous amount of it. Historical novels, in particular, can demand years of reading before the writing even begins. The author needs to understand not just the major events of the period but the texture of daily life: what people ate, how they traveled, what they wore, how they spoke, what they feared. Getting these details wrong will alienate any reader who knows the period, and getting them right requires a depth of knowledge that doesn’t come quickly. I know historical fiction writers who spend two or three years on research before writing a single sentence of the novel itself.

The Last Archive, which we publish here at ScrollWorks, involved years of archival research. The author spent time in libraries and document repositories, reading letters and records that most people would find tedious but that gave the novel its authenticity. You can feel the research in the details, the way a room is described, the specific language characters use, the small, telling observations about how institutions operated. That specificity doesn’t come from imagination alone. It comes from years of patient, unglamorous reading.

The fourth reason, and this is the one nobody likes to talk about, is that the writer gets stuck. Writer’s block, if you want to call it that, though I think the term is too tidy for what’s actually a messy, multifaceted problem. Sometimes a writer hits a point in the story where they don’t know what happens next. The plot has written itself into a corner, or a character has become inert, or the themes that seemed clear at the beginning have gotten muddled. The writer stares at the manuscript and feels nothing. No inspiration, no direction, no desire to open the file. This can last weeks, months, or years.

I’ve seen writers describe being stuck as a kind of grief. They know the book is there, somewhere, but they can’t reach it. They feel like they’ve failed, even though they haven’t. They’ve just hit a problem that their conscious mind can’t solve yet. The solution often comes from living more: reading something unrelated, having a conversation, traveling, going through an experience that shifts their perspective. The author of Echoes of Iron told me he set the manuscript aside for nearly two years and wrote short stories instead. When he came back to the novel, the problem that had stopped him was suddenly obvious, and the solution arrived within a week. He couldn’t explain why the break worked. It just did.

The fifth reason is perfectionism, which is the writer’s best friend and worst enemy simultaneously. Some writers revise endlessly, polishing every sentence, rewriting chapters that are already good because they might be better, unable to declare the book finished because “finished” means accepting that it will never be perfect. I have sympathy for this, because I’m a perfectionist myself, and I understand the ache of knowing that the words on the page don’t quite match the book in your head. But at some point, you have to let go. A book that’s 95% of what you envisioned is still a good book. A book that’s 100% of what you envisioned doesn’t exist.

There’s a famous anecdote, possibly apocryphal, about a poet who spent an entire morning adding a comma to a poem and then spent the afternoon removing it. That’s perfectionism in its purest and most destructive form. The comma didn’t matter. The poem was already done. But the poet couldn’t accept it. Some novelists live in this state for years, revising and revising and revising, never submitting, because submission means exposing the work to judgment, and the work will always fall short of the ideal version that exists only in the writer’s imagination.

The sixth reason is personal upheaval. Books are written by human beings, and human beings go through things. Divorce, illness, loss, depression, financial crises, moves across the country. Any of these can derail a book for months or years. Some writers can write through personal chaos; most can’t. A writer who’s going through a divorce doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth to inhabit a fictional world for four hours a day. They’re barely managing the real world. The book waits. It has to.

I want to push back against the narrative that a long gestation period means the book will be better. Sometimes it does. The years of reflection and revision can produce something richer and more layered than a quickly written book. But not always. Some books take ten years because the writer procrastinated, or because they couldn’t make up their mind, or because they were afraid to finish. Duration is not a quality indicator. The question isn’t how long it took but whether the final product is good.

There’s a seventh reason that’s specific to our moment in history: the internet. Writers today are more exposed to other writers’ work than ever before, and that constant exposure can be paralyzing. You write a chapter, feel good about it, then read something online that’s similar but better, and suddenly your confidence evaporates. You question your approach, your style, your entire project. Social media compounds this by making other writers’ successes highly visible. It’s hard to spend five years on a novel when you’re watching peers publish their second and third books in that same span. The comparison doesn’t make you write faster. It often makes you write slower, or stop writing entirely for months at a time while you reconsider everything.

I also want to mention the role that editors and publishers play in a book’s timeline. Sometimes a book takes years not because the writing is slow but because the path to publication is winding. A writer might finish a manuscript, submit it, receive rejections, revise based on feedback, submit again, receive more feedback, revise again, and repeat this cycle for years before finding the right publisher. The book itself might have been “done” relatively quickly, but the process of finding a home for it added years to the timeline. This is especially common for unconventional books, ones that don’t fit neatly into genre categories or that take risks that make publishers nervous. The riskier the book, the longer the search, as a general rule.

There’s also a practical cost to a long writing timeline that authors don’t always consider. The publishing market changes. A book that would have been timely in 2015 might feel dated in 2025. Trends shift, tastes evolve, the cultural conversation moves on. A historical novel set during the financial crisis felt urgent in 2012 and retrospective in 2022. This doesn’t mean the book can’t succeed, but the window of maximum relevance can close while the writer is still revising. I’ve seen it happen more than once, and it’s always painful for everyone involved.

From a publisher’s perspective, working with a book that has a long history is both a privilege and a challenge. The privilege is that the author has lived with the material for so long that they know it intimately. They can answer any question about a character or a setting or a timeline because they’ve been thinking about it for a decade. The depth of knowledge is extraordinary. The challenge is that the author is sometimes too close to the material, too protective of it, too invested in specific choices that made sense five years ago but don’t serve the book now. Editing a book that someone has worked on for ten years requires tact. You’re not just suggesting changes to a manuscript; you’re asking someone to alter a thing they’ve been building for a third of their adult life.

I think the most useful thing I can say to any writer who is years into a book and feeling discouraged is this: you’re in good company. Donna Tartt took eleven years to write “The Goldfinch.” Junot Diaz took eleven years between his first novel and his second. Tolkien worked on “The Lord of the Rings” for twelve years. These are not cautionary tales. They’re reminders that some books need time, and the time is part of the process. The goal isn’t to write fast. The goal is to write something true. If that takes a decade, it takes a decade.

And if you’re a reader holding a book that took ten years to write, you might not know it. There’s no label on the spine that says “decade in the making.” But the time is in there, woven into the depth of the characters, the precision of the language, the feeling that every sentence was considered from multiple angles. Some of the best books I’ve ever read are the ones that took the longest to write. The author’s patience becomes the reader’s reward. And that, I think, is worth waiting for.