How do you quit procrastinating and write a book?

This is probably the million dollar question, because procrastination can hit on any of the hundred days (or more) it takes to write a book and torpedo your chances of ever completing it. Even then, you may finish the draft but procrastinate on editing it.

There is a saying in the Bible book of Ecclesiastes:

For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.

What does that mean in terms of book writing? It means any old tatty, badly written, boring finished book is better than your part written masterpiece.

It means your chapter packed from beginning to end with scintillating character insights and thumping story-line, is worth nothing compared to any chapter in any published book, no matter how dull.

It means the finished first draft of your stunning debut novel sitting in a cardboard box under your desk is worthless compared with a published one written by a jaded old hack who’s churned out the same tired story-line over and over again for thirty years.

The key to procrastination is in that phrase.

You need to be properly scared of never finishing.

Writing your book needs to carry on through illness, pregnancy, birth, loss of job, accident… all the things that life throws at you. Only some strong medicine is going to keep you going through all that.

Your nine step plan to beating procrastination

This is the strategy I followed to write a 80,000 word novel in 3 months.

1. Set a target of when you will finish your first draft. Three months sounds about right for 80,000 words.
2. Divide that by the number of days you will be writing. Either make that every day, or take out the Sabbath or Sunday if you wish. That leaves you about 77 days.
3. Turn your spell checker off. Turn off the internet to your PC. Tell your family about your plan.
4. On the first day, sit down and write your target of say 1000 words. Write fast, doing no edits, checking no spellings, doing no planning… just write. Write it full of mistakes, dead ends, whatever you need to keep going. If you stop to put “quality” into it at this stage you will never get your book finished. Any mangy living dog is better than a dead lion.
5. If you run out of time before your wordcount is done, go and do whatever you have to do, then come back to it before you go to sleep, even if it’s the early hours and you’re half asleep while you type. Keep your habitual daily target alive at all cost … remember, a living dog is better than a dead lion.
6. When the first draft is done, don’t print it out in case seeing it there tricks you into thinking you’ve finished.
7. Set a deadline for when you want to have this edited. Divide the number of pages by the days you have. Set a target for that number of pages per day.
8. Print out the day’s pages and edit them, then write up those edits straight away. When finished chuck the pages. If the day’s edits are enormous and require a rewrite, jot this down in a notepad along with how many pages it needs.
9. With your edits done, now set a deadline for the rewrites in your notepad. This time do it by taking the number of words you need to write, divide that by how many you wrote per day, and use that as your deadline.

At any point along this long path when you’re starting to slow down or stop, or to skip a day’s writing, remind yourself that until this is written, edited, rewritten, and finally published, anything out there no matter how poorly written, boring, or derivative, is infinitely better than your unfinished (dead) work.