Without losing your mind
First drafts can feel laborious at times. The first rush of excited keyboard bashing gives way over time to more reluctant teeth-gritted slow trickles that can make the finish line feel another world away. But never fear! You’re in the right place. We’ve got this.
I’m going to make it super straightforward, jumping in with 8 simple tips to help keep you scribing with a spring in your step. Here goes…
1. Let it be rubbish
Get carried away, be in the moment, forget about finding the right word, ignore the finer punctuation marks and just get it down. Raw. Honest. Fresh.
Trust that you will go back over it and refine it later. For now, leave your analytical brain on the doorstep and welcome your free-flowing creative mind in. Free of charge.
2. Banish your inner critic
See where you left your analytical brain? Scratching at the door, begging to come in? Go and dump your inner critic there, too. They can keep each other company while you write like nobody’s watching. Nobody’s judging. Just you and your words and ideas gamboling around the page like a happy little care-free kangaroo.
At this point, criticism has no place in the process. All you need to do is get your thoughts down. For your eyes only. And if you hear criticism creeping in – the ‘nobody will want to read this’, ‘what if he thinks this is the best I can do?’ type doubts and attacks – flick the thoughts away like flies off a picnic.
3. Edit later
Now, the advice is to write it all out and then and only then start editing. As someone who has spent much of their career editing other people’s work for a living, I find this one the hardest. So, if you’re like me and really struggle to leave the messy, rambling first rough draft alone until it’s complete, I’ll give you a get-out clause, with one condition.
Yes, you can edit, but only by allowing yourself 10-20% of your writing time per session to look over and tweak what you wrote the day before. That’s it. That should scratch the itch. Put the neat geeks to sleep for a bit and let you get on with your day’s rough-and-ready drafting.
4. Set achievable milestones
Setting ambitious word count targets or time limits to your writing is all well and good until you realise you’ve set yourself impossible goals and all you’ve achieved is an increased sense of disappointment and despair when those goals are missed.
Try being more realistic. If you can only scrape together half an hour of writing time a day without other parts of your life suffering, make 35 minutes your goal. If you can write 1,000 words on a good day, but only usually manage 500, make 750 your push goal to make sure you have something to aim for without causing undue stress.
If you’re not into setting goals or time limits, you could try recording your word counts each time you sit down to write. You’ll see the total go up with each step, however big or small.
5. Start at the end?
This is just a gentle reminder that you don’t have to start your book at page 1, chapter 1. You can start wherever you like – the hardest part; most fun part; the longest or shortest section; start, middle or end. Dive in wherever you feel drawn to and write that first. Don’t feel you have to start at the very beginning if it’s not a very good place to start.
6. Start small
If you’re writing a full book with chapters and parts and sections or what have you, it can feel like an overwhelmingly big task. Whatever your end product size, if it feels too big, break it down into manageable chunks. Or you can even give yourself the goal of, say, writing chapter summaries if writing a whole chapter feels too much at first.
7. Read
When writing feels hard, read. When you can’t find the words, read someone else’s. When the ideas aren’t coming, read for inspiration.
8. Don’t do it alone
Even if you enjoy your own company for hours and hours at a time, writing a long piece can take its toll on your motivation and focus. There are many ways you can stay accountable, but the two big ones are to tell a friend or relative of your writing goal so that you feel somewhat beholden to them or join an accountability/co-writing group like the Writer’s Forge that we run several times a month to give you guaranteed writing time, the company of other writers, and reminders to move/drink/take a break.
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