Getting to the end of your first book is a momentous occasion and a reason to celebrate. But it’s also an important milestone for your writing career. Many aspiring authors continue working on that first book for a long time, unsure when "enough is enough."
But finishing the book, especially that first manuscript, is crucial. Because knowing you know can complete a project will boost your confidence for future projects. Getting to the end of your story isn’t always easy.
1. Give yourself permission to write crap…and fix it later. freeing yourself of your internal editor can really help when you’re feeling stuck. Get those words down, and worry about quality later. That's what revisions are for. If you’re still feeling blocked, try writing by hand, sketching out your scenes in dot-points or even changing up the font you use in your writing program of choice.
2. Reward and motivate yourself. Figure out what spurs you on. For me it’s tracking my words and seeing the total increase with each day of writing. For you, it might be sharing your progress each week with a writer friend. Maybe you like to see how much you can do in a timed period. Understanding the things that motivate you can help you leverage those things for greater momentum.
3. Find accountability. This might be a critique partner, writing buddies or someone else in your life. Determine what you want to achieve (it works best if you have something concrete like a number of words, pages or chapters) and check in with your accountability at regular intervals. For some people, myself included, it’s actually about making a promise to myself, writing down my goal and then keeping track of how I’m doing.
4. Understand the role of your internal editor. Writing and editing use different parts of the brain, and different types of writers engage these different parts at certain points in their writing process. For some people, the writing has to come first and editing second. But some writers use their internal editor before they write through planning, brainstorming etc. Knowing where and how your internal editor works will help you know whether you’re truly blocked on a project or if you just need more thinking time.
5. Break it down. Saying you’re going to write 50,000 words (or 80,000 or 100,000) can be daunting for a new writer. Chunk down your goal into manageable bite-sized pieces. 50,000 over a six-month period is just a little under 2,000 words per week. Which is 500 words a writing session if you write four days per week. Or, if you prefer to write a little every day, it's only 286 words per session. Now that sounds a little easier, doesn’t it?
Good luck! The end isn’t as far away as it seems.