Many people who want to write a book never will. I’m not saying you won’t, or that you shouldn’t try. Realistically, though, a lot of people have pretty good ideas for stories. Most of them, though, never even get to the part of the process where they start writing it.
Starting is hard for most of us for a lot of reasons. Usually, a task like writing a book feels a lot harder than it actually is in practice. It’s challenging, but it’s not nearly as impossible as you’re often led to believe. You can begin. You just have to trick your brain into thinking it’s going to be easier than it seems.
Our Brains Are Built to Fear the Unknown
Your brain doesn’t like not knowing what’s going to happen next. So it tends to make up fake scenarios of all the possible outcomes you could be facing. If you’re sitting at your desk trying to write, but starting feels impossible, it’s probably because your brain has not only thought of the possibility that you’ll fail or do a terrible job — it has also likely locked on to the worst outcomes possible. You’ll never be published. No one will ever read what you write. Or if they do, everyone will hate it.
The key to overcoming this hurdle is to start writing despite your brain’s attempts to convince you it’s not worth it. Easier said than done, usually. But every accomplished writer has at the very least made it to this step: they’ve started. It wasn’t easy, but they did it anyway. For now, that’s your only task. Start writing.
Don’t Waste Your Time Imagining the Worst — Spend It Creating Art
When aspiring writers complain about not having enough time to write, it’s usually because they’re wasting most of their active writing time … well, not actually writing. Sometimes that involves either worrying about things that haven’t happened yet (because they haven’t actually written) or passively avoiding the activity they’ve allegedly set out to do. If you’ve ever magically ended up on your phone instead of writing, hey! That’s you! We’ve all been there.
What you have to drill into your head, over and over until it sticks, is that right now, it doesn’t matter if your words make sense, if the story is good, or what other people are maybe someday going to say about it. Because these things can’t matter if you never actually write anything. Write first, worry later. I don’t normally make the rules, but this is my website, so in this specific case, this is the rule.
Set Writing Goals That Focus Exclusively on Beginning
Most aspiring writers aren’t very good at setting goals. Humans aren’t very good at this in general because we like to think in absolutes and results we can see. That usually looks like “I want to write a book” or “I want to make money writing.” Which, to be clear, are not “bad” goals themselves. But it’s a lot harder to start working toward a goal like “make money writing” when that’s your only endpoint. Where do you begin? How? When? Then decision fatigue sets in. You’re already overwhelmed and you haven’t even started writing yet.
Solving this problem isn’t as hard as it might seem. Start setting writing goals that are about beginning, not finishing. At least at first. If you set out this week to “start Chapter 1 of book draft,” and you write one sentence, you’ve technically already accomplished that first goal. You get to check it off, enjoy that burst of dopamine, and then — maybe — you’ll have the motivation and momentum to start on your next goal.
And before you know it, you’ll have written that book. One small, simple goal at a time.
Meg Dowell Writes 