Hello and welcome everyone on this chilly January Friday!
January is that time of year when everyone makes their resolutions and sets off to achieve their goals. More often than not people set the whopping goal of writing a book without ever really considering how much work goes into such a task. That’s why between January and February the majority of what I’ll be posting will be to help guide new or lost writers along in the right direction to making their dreams come true. I’m by no means an expert but I hope that everything I have to share can help one person at the very least.
This particular post is titled “How Not to Write a Book in 2021” for a reason. I suppose the best way to start is at the beginning. For the sake of your book it would be best not to create such a broad goal such as “Write a book”. This is setting yourself up for failure, unless of course your mind can operate on such a broad scale then in which case we all envy you and keep doing you.
“Write a book” can be so overwhelming that it can easily discourage you from being able to accomplish your goal. Because of this, the best course of action would be to set smaller, easier to achieve goals for yourself. Not only will you be more productive and get that much closer to achieving your goal but you’ll also be making yourself feel on top of the world while doing so.
As humans we work best when we accomplish our goals. Each time we conquer a challenge it releases a wonderful rush of dopamine into the system. This rush will encourage you to accomplish more and thus more work gets done while also making yourself feel good in the process.
Instead of setting the goal of “write a book” for yourself try something more bit sized such as “outline my story” and if outlining isn’t your thing then perhaps “come of with at least ten ideas to go into my story”. You can work your way up from there with goals such as “write chapters 1-4 this month” and so on. The more hills you work over the quicker you’ll climb the mountain of writing a book.
Something else that would be good to keep in mind is that writing a book is hard. So much effort goes into writing even the first draft of a book let alone every other step that needs to be taken. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor should you expect yourself to be able to write a book in one.
Another good tidbit is that not everyone writes at the same pace. It can take some people years to write a single book while others can pump out two or more books in a year. Then there’s the complication that some books will just come easier to you than others.
In conclusion, try not to put so much pressure on yourself. Your book will come in it’s own time but only if you allow yourself to take step for what it’s worth instead of trying to force yourself along with such a large goal in mind. As I said, I’m not an expert on this by any means, I’m just a fellow writer wanting to share some of the wisdom I’ve learned over the years. Trust me, as soon as I stopped going into every year with “write a book” set as my number one goal and instead broke that overall goal into small ones, things went much smoother.
I hope you found this helpful in one way or another.
Until next week!
✿ Happy reading and writing to all and to all a good day ✿
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