How to Write a Book Without Getting Stuck

Every writer cares about their work. They don't want to write just any book. They wanna write a really great book and that's probably true for you too, but the truth is that your desire to write a great book, your perfectionism is actually the biggest obstacle to you finishing your book.

Let's talk about that in today's lesson.

Over the last two lessons I've tried to help you see the power of deliberate practice, and why it's actually the secret to help you finish your book. We've talked about how to use consequences to make it really hard, not to write.

We've talked about the importance of finding a coach, someone who can give you feedback and teach you the right way to approach the writing process, but also studying structure as a shortcut to writing a better book. Both of those are key pieces of deliberate practice.

But there's one thing that I hear almost every time I talk to writers about writing a book. They say something like this:

📍 “I don't know if I have time to write a book.”

“I think I might just be too busy to write a book.”

“I'm not sure if I have enough time.”

And maybe you're feeling like that right now, too. And it's important because you might not even try to write a book if you don't think you have enough time, but I've also talked to so many people who think they're too busy to write a book who maybe even start writing a book and get stuck and who blame the fact that they can't finish on how little time they have, but here's the truth.

Time is almost never the real problem. The thing is if you have an hour or two per day, you can finish a book in three to four months. That's all it takes an hour or two of time per day.

Most people have an hour or two a day. A few people don't maybe you have small kids or a job where you work like 80 hours a week, or you're a college student. But I think if you have one to two hours per day, you can finish a book.

The problem isn't time. The problem is focus and perfectionism.

So let me tell you a story. When I was working on this video, it took me two weeks to finish it. When I create a video, I always write out everything I wanna say just to get it really clear, but for this video, every time I sat down to work. I struggled. I would write out a few lines and then I would get distracted and I would go check my email and then check my bank account or play some spider solitaire.

It got so bad that I would go check Facebook. And I don't even really like checking Facebook. It was terrible.

But after more than a week of doing this, I finally. I'm just stressed about it being good. I was being perfectionistic. You see, this is the last video in this series. It's really important to me that you get a lot out of it.

But every time I would sit down to work on it, it felt terrible to me. My thoughts were all out of order. I thought my ideas were lame. So instead of working on it, I procrastinated.

And, of course I blamed it on the fact that I was too busy. I had too much going on. I didn't have time to finish my writing, but honestly, if I had just sat down to write it and gotten it done, I would've finished it in less than an hour, but because I was being perfectionistic, it took me more than a week.

And that's what happens to most writers. Their perfectionism leads to procrastination and a lack of focus, which makes what could be finished in an hour or two takes so much longer. So for you and your book writing, how do you solve that problem?

When you're writing a book, it's important to just remember that writing is iterative. Here's what I mean by that.

When you're writing a first draft of a book, it's going to be bad. It always is. I've written more than a dozen books. Every first draft has been terrible has been messy, has been full of holds and that's okay. It's a first draft. You might call it a vomit draft or a Lamont calls it a shitty first draft, but it's going to be.

In fact, I tell my writers, I don't even want you to think about whether your writing is good or bad when you're working on a first draft, good or bad are not even words that we use at that point, because it doesn't matter. The only thing that you should be measuring is words on the page. How many words did you write today?

Not how good they are, but how many words that you wrote.

By focusing on quantity, not quality you get over your perfectionism and can finally get your writing done. And then we make it better in the second draft and then better still in the third draft. It's iterative. It's a process, but you have to finish your first draft before you can get to the second and third and fourth drafts.

Now, one of the most useful tools that we have as writers to get over our perfectionism is called a writing sprint.

A writing sprint is where you set a timer and write as much as you can in that amount of time. You don't worry about whether it's good or not. You just worry about how many words you write.

You might set your timer for 30 minutes or 10 minutes. But I actually like to set my timer for three minutes because anyone can focus for three minutes, even though I can focus for three minutes. Once you've written for three minutes, you go and you check to see how many words that you wrote during that time.

And then you set your timer again for three minutes, and you try to beat your score and you can do this again and again, and the best part about sprints is that not only will they help you get past perfectionism, but they're actually really fun. It kind of makes a game out of the hard work of writing.

So that's my challenge to you today. If you're feeling like you want to write, or you don't have enough time, just do this: set a timer for three minutes.

Everyone has three minutes, even you have three minutes, and then go and see how much you can write. And I will bet after your timer goes off, you'll be ready to set it again and keep writing.

All right, everyone. That's it for our free three part book writing series. I hope you found this helpful for your writing process.

The next step is that we have a live training coming up where we're going into more detail on how to write a book through deliberate practice.

It's gonna be a great way to see you to answer your book, writing questions, but it's live only. So make sure you stay tuned for the times on that. And we'll hopefully see you there.

In the meantime, happy writing and we'll see you soon.