Jill Harness
6 Famous Novels Penned in Under a Month
by Jill Harness - November 1, 2011 - 12:01 AM

It’s National Novel Writing Month! Some people criticize the concept, claiming that novels written in under a month aren’t going to be worth the paper they’re printed on. But there are plenty of examples to prove the naysayers wrong. In fact, many classic, bestselling novels were penned within this time frame. While these authors completed these fine pieces of literature without the motivation of National Novel Writing Month, they still serve as an excellent example to those hoping to complete their own works this November.

1. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas: Irish novelist John Boyne said he was so wrapped up in this engrossing tale of a boy living through the Holocaust that he wrote the entire thing in two and a half days, barely stopping to eat or sleep throughout the ordeal. He notes that his other novels took months of planning and effort to write, but this story simply could not be slowed.

2. On The Road: The so-called “beatnik bible” that inspired an entire generation was penned in only three weeks. Granted, Jack Kerouac spent seven years travelling across America and taking detailed notes the entire time, but the actual fruits of his labor took less than a month to put on paper. It’s worth noting that he typed the entire draft on one 120 foot long piece of teletype paper that he taped together before writing.

3. A Study In Scarlet: The novel that introduced the famed detective work of Sherlock Holmes to the masses took Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle three weeks to write in 1886. This story was also notable for being the first Sherlock Holmes story to be adapted to the silver screen.

4. The Tortoise and the Hare: In 1954, Elizabeth Jenkins wrote this tale in three weeks after being romantically entwined with a man who refused to leave his wife. She revealed in an interview in 2005, “I have never looked at it since; it marked an era to which I had no desire to return.”

5. The Gambler: Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote this tale in 26 days while also writing Crime and Punishment. He was heavily in debt and addicted to gambling and saw the semi-autobiographical novella as a good way to help him pay off his debts. He later ended up marrying the young stenographer to whom he dictated the story.

6. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Muriel Spark took only one month to write this novel about a fictionalized version of her teacher, Christiana Kay. She said the story was inspired by a 1960 class assignment: “We were given to write about how we spent our summer holidays, but I wrote about how [my teacher] spent her summer holidays instead. It seemed more fascinating.”

If you’re participating in National Novel Writing Month, good luck! We hope these stories helped inspire you to get cracking.

Note: This article originally appeared last November.

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Comments (37)

  1. Thanks Jill! I have no desire to publish my NaNo efforts, I do it for fun, but it’s great to know of books written in this time frame. :)

    posted by Karen on 11-10-2010 at 1:07 pm

  2. My ten-year-old daughter is doing this thanks to a challenge from an educational web site she frequents.

    posted by feefifoto on 11-10-2010 at 1:41 pm

  3. I’ve yet to read “On the Road” but I have seen the actual manuscript when it came to our art museum a few summers ago. They couldn’t unroll the whole thing, but they had a display case made that was about 30 feet long so you could walk around what was visible and peer right over the top of the glass to get a good look. You could still see his pencil marks on the page where he’d made edits. It was amazing.

    posted by Grobanite33 on 11-10-2010 at 1:47 pm

  4. If I recall correctly, Fahrenheit 451 was written in something like ten hours on a borrowed typewriter…

    posted by Jaydee Faire on 11-10-2010 at 2:09 pm

  5. Another one for you – Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days on the typewriter at the local library.

    posted by R on 11-10-2010 at 2:12 pm

  6. The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written in just a couple of weeks. Then, after his wife was so horrified by it, R.L.Stevenson threw it in the trash. Later, he decided to re-write it from memory, taking just a weekend to do so.

    posted by SinisterChuck on 11-10-2010 at 2:30 pm

  7. I couldn’t confirm it, but I worked in a theater in the early 90s and there were “movie facts” on the screen between shows, and one of the slides said Stallone wrote the script for Rocky in about 15 minutes—that would be another interesting column, how fast some movies were written or filmed (Wayne’s World was filmed in less than 30 days).

    posted by Wayne on 11-10-2010 at 2:31 pm

  8. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written in a weekend on a dare.

    posted by Zoop on 11-10-2010 at 2:32 pm

  9. Thanks for inspiration! I participated in NaNoWriMo last year, and it was a grueling, but rewarding experience. I haven’t done anything with my “novel” yet, but it was well worth it to get the story that had been rattling around in my head for years out and onto the paper. Maybe this will motivate me to get back to editing!

    posted by Megan on 11-10-2010 at 2:40 pm

  10. I am trying the NaNoWriMo challenge now and I am doing it very slowly. Water for Elephants actually came out of the NaNoWriMo challenge, so there is another book written in a short time.

    posted by Varmus on 11-10-2010 at 2:48 pm

  11. Post Office by Charles Bukowski (probably the greatest American writer) was written in under a month after John Martin, founder and owner of Black Sparrow Press, offered Bukowski 100/month for life on the condition that Bukowski quit working for the post office and write full time.

    and it is one of my favorite books!

    posted by andy on 11-10-2010 at 4:02 pm

  12. A couple of corrections to the comments above:

    Mary Shelly came up with the story idea on a weekend. Lord Byron challenged her to craft a ghost story while the Shelly’s were on a joint vacation with him. Her husband encouraged her to make the story into a novel – which took a year.

    Ray Bradbury wrote “Fahrenheit 451″ in 9 days but he had already published the kernel of the plot in a short story call “The Fireman”. From a wonderful interview on the topic:
    “Ray Bradbury: In 1950, our first baby was born, and in 1951, our second, so our house was getting full of children. It was very loud, it was very wonderful, but I had no money to rent an office. I was wandering around the UCLA library and discovered there was a typing room where you could rent a typewriter for ten cents a half-hour. So I went and got a bag of dimes. The novel began that day, and nine days later it was finished. But my God, what a place to write that book! I ran up and down stairs and grabbed books off the shelf to find any kind of quote and ran back down and put it in the novel. The book wrote itself in nine days, because the library told me to do it.”
    http://www.neabigread.org/books/fahrenheit451/fahrenheit451_04.php

    posted by n2y2 on 11-10-2010 at 4:16 pm

  13. This is my third year participating in NaNoWriMo and I always have a blast. It would nice if my masterpiece came from this but I highly doubt it. 26,827 words!

    posted by Cam on 11-10-2010 at 5:13 pm

  14. ‘National’ NoWriMo….. What nation? I can’t find anything on their site that says what nation.

    posted by Bakedpotatoes on 11-10-2010 at 5:14 pm

  15. Wasn’t “Who killed the Electric Sheep” written in a day??

    posted by cory on 11-10-2010 at 5:47 pm

  16. Oops I meant “Do androids dream of Electric Sheep?” By Philip K. Dick

    posted by cory on 11-10-2010 at 5:47 pm

  17. @Baked Potatoes: Any nation! I think they’d change it, but Nanowrimo sounds so catchy, don’t you think?

    posted by Noelle on 11-10-2010 at 6:17 pm

  18. erm, it should be noted that Arthur Conan Doyle’s work is on that list almost entirely because of cocaine.

    posted by xv on 11-10-2010 at 8:17 pm

  19. @Noelle: I thought that might have been the case… Thanks :)

    posted by Bakedpotatoes on 11-10-2010 at 9:33 pm

  20. Not especially ‘famous’, but I wrote my Bulwer-Lytton winning Vile Pun in maybe 10 minutes one night around midnight when inspiration hit nearly fully formed.

    Sorry for the self promtion :-)

    posted by Amy on 11-11-2010 at 2:03 am

  21. The objective of NaNoWriMo is to begin a novel, not necessarily finish it. 50k in most cases is not a complete manuscript, and NaNo recognizes this.

    posted by Alyssa on 11-11-2010 at 9:04 am

  22. Amy- that pun was absolutely TERRIBLE! And worthy of the award- congrats!

    Copied from the site…
    (Vile Puns: “It was a risky production unlike any mounted prior on the Met stage, the orchestra first imitating the perpetually beating heart of a man walled-in while in pursuit of wine , and then a soprano singing the plaintive aria of a barely alive woman stuffed up a chimney as her ancestral home was destroyed; however, it certainly was Opera Poe.” [rimshot! - ed.] – Amy Torchinsky, Greensboro, NC)

    posted by Scott-O on 11-11-2010 at 10:42 am

  23. Gore Vidal wrote “The City and the Pillar” over a long weekend. This was the first “legitimate” gay themed novel to achieve main stream status. It was also printed in The Atlantic Monthly.

    posted by DrBill on 11-11-2010 at 2:27 pm

  24. Hans Fallada completed Every Man Dies Alone in just twenty-four days.

    posted by NderToad on 11-11-2010 at 7:30 pm

  25. Thanks, Scott-O

    :-D

    posted by Amy on 11-12-2010 at 1:56 am

  26. It took me only 2 days to write this comment.

    posted by DJ on 11-12-2010 at 3:23 pm

  27. Samuel Johnson write Rasselas in a week.

    posted by Yerushalimey on 11-14-2010 at 5:59 am

  28. Mark Twain’s “Puddn’head Wilson” was written Nov.12 to Dec. 14, 1904(?) There’s an early NaNo for you!
    Not a very *good* novel, of course…

    posted by BlueCrab on 11-14-2010 at 1:09 pm

  29. A LOT of Georges Simenon’s novels were written in well under a month.

    Bests to all,

    –tr

    posted by Tony Rabig on 11-16-2010 at 10:55 am

  30. Bret Easton Ellis claims to have written “Less Than Zero” in something like ten hours while on a cocaine/meth bender.

    posted by Nick on 11-1-2011 at 12:15 am

  31. What’s not mentioned about “On the Road” is why it was written on a roll of paper. Jack was too hopped up on speed to change the paper.

    posted by Tina on 11-1-2011 at 1:08 am

  32. Nadar el Saadawi wrote the feminist novel “Woman at Point Zero” in a week. But then, it is a very short novel…

    posted by Emma on 11-1-2011 at 1:53 am

  33. Author Piers Anthony has written 140 books over a 50 year period (most of them full length I believe) which translates to about 3 a year. Even more astounding, all of the ones i have read have been at least decent and most have been quite good.

    posted by Darin on 11-1-2011 at 12:56 pm

  34. I bet there are many, many more where the author claimed it took a year.

    posted by Cort on 11-1-2011 at 8:50 pm

  35. Great article. And thanks for all these concrete examples! While many can pen a book in less than a month, it does take longer to revise it. At least I am hoping that NaNoWriMo winners are revising their books before sending them out! I wrote my nonfiction book in 26 days during NaNo 2009: Write-A-Thon: Write Your Book in 26 Days (And Live to Tell About It). I cover writing both fiction and nonfiction in a short time–both very doable.

    posted by Rochelle Melander on 11-2-2011 at 5:43 pm

  36. I had no idea NaNoWriMo existed outside of the fanfiction universe. Great list!

    posted by Elle on 11-2-2011 at 7:32 pm

  37. Most of my books were written in under a month. It’s definitely possible when the story flows.

    posted by Tara Shuler on 11-3-2011 at 3:17 pm

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