Since most writers are fascinated by the writing processes of other writers, I thought I’d share the process that has helped me write three novels and get me 80,000 words into my fourth. If you’re not a writer, the following mind hacks might give you ideas on how to finish your own major project.<\/p>\n
The primary challenge of writing any novel is to simply finish it. If you’re writing your first book, that should be your challenge — just finish it.<\/p>\n
That’s why I came up with “100,000 in 100” — write 100,000 words (or finish the book) within 100 days.<\/p>\n
I did this for a very commercial reason: to see if I could become a “book-a-year” writer. To build a loyal readership, publishers like to have their authors write one book per year. “100,000 in 100” was well within professional standards, and certainly doable for me.<\/p>\n
Not to mention that the more books I write, the better my chances of getting published.<\/p>\n
Writing a novel is a marathon, so it needs to be tackled in chunks or you’ll go crazy thinking about the enormity of it. That’s why I set a strict yet attainable goal of 1000 words per day. Once I reached 1000, I considered the day a success, and gave myself permission to quit. Getting to 1000 was hard at first, but once I got into a routine, I was able to bang out 1000 (first draft) words in about an hour.<\/p>\n
Without a doubt, this was the single biggest key to reaching my goal. Once I accepted that my first draft will<\/strong> be complete and utter crap, I could simply write the novel’s first draft without second-guessing myself as I wrote.<\/p>\n It’s a freeing feeling to turn off that pesky internal editor. If I wrote something that contradicted a previous chapter, I simply made a note to change that chapter in the second draft, and continued on. If I struggled with the stylistic wording of a piece of dialogue, I wrote the dialogue in sparse text, and continued on. God forbid, I even used cliches! Whatever it took to reach my daily quota, I did it.<\/p>\n All writers have those days when we look at the computer and say, “I don’t feel like it.” To keep myself motivated and on schedule, I recorded my daily word output on a spreadsheet calendar. It was that little incentive of entering my word count at the end of the day — and figuring out my words-to-date total — that got me to finish my quota on some of the toughest days. Someday I’ll have a publishing contract to keep me motivated, but for now, this will do.<\/p>\n After every book I’ve written, my wife and I celebrate by go going to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, where the steaks melt in your mouth and the lobster bisque should be illegal. After you finish a project \u00e2\u20ac\u201c novel, short story, magazine article, blog post \u00e2\u20ac\u201c do something to celebrate. Writing is a blast, but it’s also work. When you’re \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pre-published\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (thank you Lisa Shearin<\/a> for the term!), you sometimes need something other than a contract to get your butt in the chair. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since most writers are fascinated by the writing processes of other writers, I thought I’d share the process that has helped me write three novels and get me 80,000 words into my fourth. If you’re not a writer, the following mind hacks might give you ideas on how to finish your own major project. 1. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}4. Stick to your goal<\/h3>\n
5. Celebrate!<\/h3>\n