Authors are, as a group, unorganized and easily distracted. Me, included.
After I find them additional hours a day to write, they fill that time up with nonwriting. Emails, Facebook, Twitter, online writing course, articles.
Cat videos…
First, write.
ONLY when you have the writing finished for the day, then and only then do you allow yourself to access distractions like email, CC, etc. They suck you into a time vacuum and you look up and an hour’s gone. Set a goal, maybe for a number of words. (I usually go for a scene, not words). When the scene is completed, you’re all set. If you have time aside for writing, FB and Twitter and the rest will happily wait while you write. Because if the writing doesn’t get finished, the rest doesn’t matter. You need to set a date by which to have the book complete. What? Blasphemy! Well, if you know roughly how long it takes per chapter, and how many chapters roughly remain in your outline, you have a number to hit. Yeah, the numbers will be off, but every evening will be like Christmas when you are banging it out and getting closer and closer to your goal of a completed book.
Get the goal set right now, today, and then lay it out. It’s February. If you follow this advice, your book’s first draft could be finished by the end of February, depending on how far along you are with it. Allow a few weeks for editing and beta readers, and maybe another draft, and on March 31, you’re ready to publish. Friend me on FB and I’ll help you at every step along the way, but odds are you will NEVER finish the way you are going, and I want you to finish! The first book is the hardest. When that’s over, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. Like driving a car. You could barely keep it on the road when you first climbed behind the wheel. Now you can talk on the phone, eat a cheeseburger, tune the radio, and drive simultaneously. It’s effortless.
Get to the writing first. All the rest will wait.
As good as it feels to do all the other stuff, how SATISFIED will you feel on Tuesday when you wrote for 4 hours on Monday? You’ll feel amazing.
Now, how will you feel on Tuesday if you did CC and Fb and email on Monday – and didn’t write?
Which feeling do you prefer?
Write. The other stuff will be just fine without you. Do that crap at lunch, do it at breakfast, or take a break from it for a month, but realize that IT IS PREVENTING YOUR BOOK FROM GETTING WRITTEN. A year from now will you be happier that you did emails and FB and CC, or put a book out that is selling?
Focus: keep your eyes on the prize.
Oh, and if you still need ways to find time to write, that’s here
I am guilty of getting sucked into time vacuums all the time!
Blogging is my biggest time-suck. Sure, it’s still writing, but it isn’t book-finishing! I’m gonna’ try your advice there, Dan. Super motivator. Thanks for pointing me over here.
xx,
mgh
(Madelyn Griffith-Haynie – ADDandSoMuchMORE dot com)
ADD/EFD Coach Training Field founder; ADD Coaching co-founder
“It takes a village to transform a world!”
Depending on how often you blog, there is another trick you can do. I’ve used this before.
You can ask a few friends to make guest blog posts for you while you focus on your book. You can also do a few reruns that are helpful but old and maybe didn’t get many views. That’s not exactly recycling but if nobody saw them what’s the harm?
Also, you can schedule your posts so if you take one Day and come up with three or four short posts, depending on how often you blog that can buy you a week or several weeks.
Obviously a combination of the those works best. That said, everybody’s gonna take a break even if they are eyeballs deep in their writing, so you can always reply to comments during the breaks and it won’t seem like you scheduled it and walked away from your blog from month.
Thanks, Dan, but I have to ask the meaning of that “short” word. Have you BEEN to my blog? (lol)
What would really make my life is for somebody to pay all my expenses and clean my house while I write and blog. Know anyone? 🙂
Seriously, thanks for the tips.
xx,
mgh