Organize your work area
The most trivial point of this instruction, but one of the most important. It is necessary to understand in what conditions you are comfortable: when there is a lot of bustle around, or, on the contrary, in a separate room, behind a comfortable chair and in complete isolation. You can not not have a place to work – whether it is a cafe, where you usually go, or at home.
Remember that you’ll be spending many hours in front of a computer (typewriter?), so take care of your back and neck, especially if you have health problems. Also, get some auxiliary things like a whiteboard to draw a visual structure, a notepad for notes, stickers and other things so you don’t get distracted by little things while you’re working.
Break the work down into smaller tasks
Writing a book is like eating an elephant. You can’t do it in one sitting. Remember the process of writing a thesis? It was much more efficient to break the whole process down into reserch, fish through sections, edit (several times), finalize, etc. than to try to do everything without a clear plan.
Formulate the “big idea.”
Another question that aspiring (and not only) authors face is what to write a book about? We give you a hint – your work should have a broad concept. Nowadays, no one is interested in publishing books with a narrow idea. If you have it (and it is good, but small), publish the finished text in your blog or arrange to publish the article on third-party resources. Think bigger and broader: if it’s fiction, compare it to, say, The Lord of the Rings, if non-fiction, compare it to Allen Carr’s How to Quit Smoking.
If you’ve tried writing your book before and on page 20-30 you have a creative crisis, it’s probably precisely because the original idea wasn’t as broad. How do you prevent this from happening? If in a conversation with friends about “the book I’m writing,” you go deeper each time and don’t repeat yourself, it’s probably just that.
Create a plan
To write a book, you need a plan. Even if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t really care much about what happens at the end of the book (you’re more interested in developing the characters and story within and seeing what happens), you should have at least a general idea to keep in your head.
If you’re an aspiring author, an agent (if there is one) will ask for a full synopsis of the work initially – and there’s a lot more work to do than you’d like.
And if it’s for non-fiction, there’s no avoiding it. As a rule, you’ll be required to have a complete structure, a reserch base, thoughts that arise during the reading and at the end of it.
Set a clear deadline and organize a work plan
You don’t have a deadline from your publisher, so you’ll have to set your own. And it’s your sanctuary. You have to stick to it anyway. How to do it.
Figure out how many pages will be in your book. It doesn’t matter if it’s 300, 400, or 800. Then divide those pages by the number of days (hours) you can and want to devote to this work. The resulting figure is a unit of work per unit of time. It can, of course, change in the process. If you find it difficult to pull off 10 pages in one day (and you only manage 4-5), change your plan.
Most writers don’t turn in work on deadline (their own or from a publisher). If you’re one of those who can handle it, you’ll already stand out from the rest.
Make time to write your book. This usually involves time sacrifices: you’ll need to sleep less, have less fun (going to concerts or going to the movies). How badly do you want to write a book? This desire translates into your race to finish before the deadline. After all, it is sacred.
