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Write Your Book Now - 10 Ways to Overcome Your Procrastination

Producing a book can seem like a daunting project - worthy of procrastination. We all know that procrastination is the take action of putting off something until a later time. Like writing this article. I started last night - and additionally wished I'd finished then - but I didn't. So here I am bogged down with it. Since William James said, "Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. " Procrastination is considered a coping mechanism for dealing with the anxiety or fear. If anxiety or fear don't exist, we wouldn't put things off. We would go for it! So procrastination is self-sabotaging-keeping us from beginning to see our dreams. In regard to writing your book, you may have put it off for any number of reasons. Perhaps it's fear of fail - or success. Or you think you're not a good enough writer; you don't know enough to write anything; you will never get your book published; no one will like your book or what you have to say; you don't have time to write, you may plain HATE TO WRITE. non-etheless, you really want to write that book. You have an expertise you want to share that will helps others; you help to write a book. You just finished a book that you could have published better. You've got a story that's been bouncing around in your head for years. Still - you haven't started writing an individual's book. Why? Maybe your anxieties are overwhelming your desire-and you need to change that. Visualize your wish as a published author. You are the expert. See yourself holding your book, talking to others about it. Maybe you're at a book signing or giving a talk about it, or being interviewed by the media. Your result? Your status is bolstered and you enjoy success because of the book. How badly do you want to attain this want to find themselves publishing book? Write a number 1 to 10 (highest). If it's 7 or above, what's stopping any from pursuing your dream? Ask yourself: What's the worse thing that could happen? Even if your book has been a failure, you would learn from the process and move on. The literature is replete with the failed stories of flourishing authors. Remember, the worst regrets are on the chances you never took! Once you identify those demons forbidding your success, you can overcome them-and take action. Let's look at ten major excuses for not writing your current book - and how to overcome them. 1 . I don't have enough time. Set aside just 15 minutes every day to figure on your book. Perhaps, get up 15 minutes earlier. Commit to focusing at least 15 minutes a day of uninterrupted writing. Within your "writing time, " do not answer the phone, e-mails, or text messages. Just like you plan uninterrupted time to workout in order to meditate or to be with your kids, devote at least 15 minutes every day to work on your book. 2 . I'm way too busy and "forget" about writing my book. Set a schedule and put writing on your "to do" list. Now that you have committed to just 15 minutes, schedule it into your day on a regular basis-preferably once every day-so it becomes part of your routine. That way you won't forget or avoid it. Hold one self responsible to working on your book each day. Check it off your "to do" list as a way with acknowledging your success in following through with your goal. Then reward yourself with something that works for your needs. 3. I don't know where to begin. Start at the endpoint to create a structure-a plan for your book--like an architect. People wouldn't begin building a house without a blueprint. Likewise, you need a plan for your book. Rather than start by writing without the need of direction, the first step is to give thought-a great deal of thought to the structure of your book. 4. It's too mind-boggling. Create your plan in manageable steps. Identify your vision, goals, and expectations for your book. Set off from there, in small steps, to identify your target audience, branding, positioning, even your table of ingredients. At AuthorAssist, we offer 15 exercises that result in a personal guidebook for writing your book-- your strategy. Realize, you haven't yet written a single word! But now you have a plan-a direction for starting-and completing your book. 5. I hate to write. Consider dictating your manuscript. Choose from a variety of voice recognition software programs or dictate into a digital recorder or even your cell phone. The digital file can be imported into the voice recognition program or you can hire someone to manually transcribe the file. Since we talk sooner than we write, this can be an efficient and less stressful method, for getting a first draft of your book. 6. My workspace is too cluttered and uninviting. According to Salvatore Manzi of Feng Shui Life Mapping. com, "Start by setting up an office that is free from such distractions. Anything on your desk or office environment that is unfinished, unloved, or unused is clutter eating up the energy that could be used creatively with your succeed. As you spend time looking for something you need, you'll get distracted by the desire to finish something else and put things on their place. " Remember your dream of writing your book? Incorporate a visual image-a mock book cover and also photo of yourself at a book signing. This will motivate you and provide focus on your writing. 7. I want a deadline to get things done. Give yourself a firm time frame for completing one manageable step to your plan. If you're devoting only 15 minutes, it may take several days to complete one step. That's okay. Just connect with your deadline. Create a calendar to show when that step will be completed and the next one started-and progress from there. 8. I feel alone in trying to start my book. Enlist a writing coach or even buddy to get you going-and keep you going. Writing is a solitary endeavor and it's easy to feel by itself in your thoughts and words. Hire a writing coach or enlist another writer to help you overcome the procrastination associated with starting your book. A coach provides the specific steps for developing your blueprint. Then you can get started the actual writing, dictating subchapters at a time to get to that vital first draft. Your coach or buddy might check up on you regularly to ensure you are making progress. As one client said, "Working on the exercises together in addition to having someone out there giving me instant feedback was extremely helpful. " 9. Writing/publishing my booklet is too expensive. How much is it worth to succeed at your dream - and boost your status? Yes, there are actually costs, as with anything worthwhile. Like the tasks involved, the costs are manageable and can be budgeted in small to medium sized chunks. 10. It doesn't matter if I put if off a while longer. Where will you be a year from now: hoping you had started today-or holding a copy your published book? When it comes to taking the first step toward writing your own book, it's easy to but it off until tomorrow. Remember, the best way to get something done is to begin. Do It Now.

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How To Write A Book

Very simple. It starts with understanding the market. A scary business Writing books is a scary business, but the scariest bits of the entire game is this: it's very easy to make a complete mess of the entire project before you get written your first word. You can misjudge the market. You can foul up your plot. You can have a hopelessly insufficient knowledge of your characters, or the world in which they find themselves. If you get these things badly wrong in the outset, you're headed straight for a giant mess. So planning matters. At the same time, any form of creative composing needs a kind of fluidity. It's just not possible to plan a thing out completely. For one thing, it's hard to help squash all your inventiveness into the three month period you've allotted. For another, the process of writing might reveal more to you about your characters and your story, and you need to give yourself room to answer these insights. The seat of your trousers There is no one single way to approach these issues. I know one publisher who wrote so many notes when it came to researching her first novel that the notes ended up increasingly being longer than the book itself. I also know an excellent author (one of whose books was a great deal promoted on TV and which sold a huge number of copies as a result) who takes precisely the antipode approach. she likes to research a period, get interested in some aspect of it, then she just starts to jot down. she barely knows her character and knows nothing of the story; she just throws the door available and waits to see what will come along. There are a number of other commercially successful authors who work in a similar way. Which means that there are different routes you can take, but most new writers who take one of these more extreme territory will have cause to regret it. If you are an extreme note-taker, then ask yourself honestly whether your book must have more research or whether you are simply procrastinating. It may well be that you are afraid of starting, which is a correctly understandable fear and one to be cured in one way and one way only: by getting stuck in. Since Kinglsey Amis famously put it, 'The art of writing is the art of applying the seat to your trousers to the seat of one's chair'. There's a little more to it than that maybe, but it's still Session One, the only lesson that tolerates no exceptions. Equally, if you're attracted to the vigour and boldness in the 'just get started' approach, ask yourself if you are not, in fact , afraid of the disciplines of planning, if you are not necessarily afraid of them because they're precisely what you most need. It's possible that, without planning anything out, you certainly will write a wonderful novel, appear on TV and sell a zillion copies - but statistically conversing, you are vastly more likely to end up with an unsaleable manuscripts, most of whose flaws were entirely predictable from the get go. Chasing Kay Scarpetta Let's assume, then, that you're sold on the idea of planning things out to some (non-obsessive) span. Where should you start? You start, inevitably, in the place you hope to finish: in a bookshop. A bookshop isn't simply a repository of all the world's greatest fiction and non-fiction; it's a marketplace and a catwalk too. You might want to learn to read wisely, commercially. Let's say, for example , that you intend to write crime fiction. Perhaps you happen to have a delicate spot for the British crime fiction of the 'Golden Age'. You love Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Bulldog Drummond, the 'Saint' and all the rest of it. So you want to do something similar. Something which includes a modern setting, of course, but nevertheless a novel that brews up the same attractive blend of comfortable living, provided social values, amateur sleuths, decent but bumbling policemen, and a good old splash of upper class experiencing. So you do. You write that book. It boasts strong characters, warm prose and a deft, when contrived, plot. (The contrivances are part of the feel. ) You may well achieve a manuscript that appropriately accomplishes its goals. And it will never sell. Perhaps, in truth, if the book was good enough, you might find a second collection publisher to take it off you for a very small advance. You might even, with a little luck, lure a giant publisher into launching the book at the cosy crime market, where you can perhaps aim to sell 5 and 10, 000 paperbacks tops, and little hope of cracking any overseas market. But you'll never earn a living from writing and indeed, because agents know the way the dice are likely to fall, you'll have the greatest difficulty in gaining even this success, because it won't be worth most agents' while to help you there. Why? Because you're authoring for the market as it was seventy years ago, not as it is today. The modern crime writer has to respond to that Dashiell Hammett / Raymond Chandler revolution of the 1940s. They have to deal with an audience that has learned forensics from Patricia Cornwell, seen society from the viewpoint of a Michael Collins, encountered feminism from Sara Paretsky, learned place from Ian Rankin, studied mood and light with the Scandinavians, and that expects books, enjoy Hollywood, to deliver thrills as well as mysteries. You can't even model your work after current bestsellers. Take the forensically driven novels of Patricia Cornwell as an example. She's still an active writer, and her work still regularly tops bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. But if you write like her, your booklet won't sell. That seems crazy at one level. She's a smash-hit, number one, multi-millionaire bestseller. If you happen to write like her, how can you not do well? At another level, though - the level of commercial reality, in truth - it makes perfect sense. If people want to read Patricia Cornwell, they will read Patricia Cornwell. Next her exhilarating decision to put forensics at the heart of the crime novel, others have followed suit, notably Kathy Reichs and the CSI TV series. There is now a huge forensically-led crime literature, dominated by the names which created it. If, more than two decades after Kay Scarpetta first emerged, you are seeking to chase an identical crowd, then you're twenty years out of date. Instead, you need to learn the market. You need to feel out its leading edge. You certainly essential info the big names in the market you want to write for. In crime fiction, for example , no writer can afford to never read Patricia Cornwell, because she's created such a large chunk of the contemporary crime vocabulary. But that is the historical part of your research. The current part is this: you need to buy and read debut novels issued as a result of major publishers in the last two or three years. You need to pay very particular attention to the novels that have done abnormally well (won prizes, been acclaimed, sold lots of copies), because these are the novels that publishers independently will use as their lodestars. The recency of the novels matters acutely, because you that guarantees contemporaneity. The reality that they are debut novels (or perhaps second novels) also matters, because it proves that the work is being produced for the qualities of the work itself, not because of the author's name, fame, or past achievements. That a serious publisher has its name on the book also matters, because it's likely to indicate that a good n amount of money has been paid for it. It's a probable indication that the market considered that book by that author to remain 'hot'. Needless to say, it's not enough to read these books. You also have to know what to do with them. Pigeon English, a first innovative by Stephen Kelman, recently sold for a high six-figure sum, following an astonishing auction contested simply by 12 different publishers. The book has been sold to publishers in the US, the UK, Brazil, Canada, China, People from france, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and elsewhere. Books like this come along very seldom and its author was altogether unknown beforehand. Yet his book looks set to be a massive world-wide hit. If you are seeking to write with the similar territory, then you need to understand the ingredients of Kelman's success. You don't need to understand them, because you propose slavishly to replicate them, but you need to understand literature as being in a kind of long-running conversation with again. You need to understand what feels current, what feels settled, what feels disputed, what holes and voids and additionally gaps may be opening up. Needless to say, you need to understand this conversation as it applies to your particular genre, whatever that is, but virtually no genre exists in complete isolation from the rest (though sci-fi and fantasy gets closer than most). If you read narrowly, you're likely to miss an important part of the developing conversation. Reading the market well is an extraordinarily challenging art. It is also an extraordinarily important one. It's both the most elusive and the most vital skill this any writer can have. Remember that you're at a huge disadvantage in this area. Every agent and every publisher is actually in the market, buying, selling, talking, comparing. These people aren't mostly reading the books that are on the bookshelves today. They're reading the books that will be on the bookshelves in eighteen months' time. They know exactly what guides are most hotly contested at auction. They'll know which books almost didn't sell at all. They are going to know the advances and the sales stats. When a book does unusually well or flops unusually severely, the trade will grope towards a consensus understanding of the outcome and alter its buying habits consequently. Reading this, most writers will draw the only logical conclusion, and instantly seek out marriage with a literary solution or successful commissioning editor. That's a good strategy and one that I'd commend unreservedly. If, however , people suffer the misfortune of being happily married already, you'll simply need to rub along as best you can. Imagine reading a lot, reading widely, and staying current. Looking inward These strictures might sound as if they're dealing with something external, but they're not really. They're talking about you. Most books that fail at the very first hurdle : that of concept - are more than anything else failures of honesty. You need to approach your own ideas using radical honesty. Is your idea for a book really founded on a good idea, or do you simply have a personalized attachment to it? Are you attached to it simply because it was the first idea that came to you? In very many cases, it does not take latter. Clear-sighted honesty is desperately hard to come by. It's taken me five or ten years to get close in addition to I've plenty more to learn yet. But one powerful tip is this: you must cultivate a positive posture towards contemporary fiction. In my role as editorial consultant, I often hear new writers say, 'There's so much rubbish published these days, ' or words to that effect. No one who has ever spoken those key phrases has got within a mile of publication. Of course, not all new books are good. There has never been a short while in history when they were. But it's very rare indeed that books are published which are incompetent for their sort. Dan Brown writes bad prose, but his audience doesn't care, as long as the story cracks with. John Banville's narratives may sometimes seem to have stalled completely in a flow of beautiful sentences, nevertheless his readers don't come to him for shoot-outs and car chases. Both authors excel at what people do. If you treat contemporary fiction as an embarrassment and a let-down, you can't hear its conversation. You won't generate anything which seems timely or pertinent. You won't get published and don't deserve to. The cynical path to failure It's also worth being clear about one other thing. I am not advocating cynicism. No cynically prepared book has ever sold. At the Mills & Boon end of the market, perhaps, a few cynically penned books are acquired, though not often even then. You must write for the market, because if you don't the market is usually unlikely to want what you produce. But you must also write with passion and conviction. You must - we should call a spade a spade - write with love. This game is so hard, so filled with challenges, you don't stand a hope unless you do.

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