How to fit in writing your book into your life

Have you ever wondered how you’re going to fit writing your book around all the other responsibilities you have in your life, whether that’s your job, running your business, and children, whatever it is. How are you going to magically create this time to write your book?

Well, I’ve got some tips for you here that can help you.

Have a rock-solid outline

The first thing is to have an outline. The outline does two jobs. One it means when you work, you work really efficiently. We’re only putting things in the book that we need. Brilliant. The other thing is it breaks the book down into manageable chunks.

You probably heard the metaphor of getting across the river.

There’s a big fast river and the water’s flowing really, really quickly in front of you and you think, “How am I going to get across?” What you need to do is find some stepping stones and just go one step at a time and before you know, you’ve got across this raging river. It’s exactly the same with the book. The bits in your outline become those little stepping stones so you make a commitment and you think, right, I’ll do one stepping stone a day or two stepping stones a day, however you want to break it up to make sure you get to the other side in a timely manner. You don’t want to lurk but you don’t need to rush either because you can take a breather on the stepping stones and move onto the next one. That’s how I recommend you do it.

Don’t do too little or too much

Set yourself limits. …I’m going to do four or five headings in my outline a day or four or five key points, depending on how big they are. If you aim to do one and a half to two hours a writing a day, your book will be done within a month typically if you’re looking at around say 30-40,000 words depending on how quickly you write. You will be able to do it really quickly without rushing.

One point about working on headings is that you need to make sure you’re not slogging through explaining the headings for the sake of it. It’s one thing pushing yourself to write the headings and do your elaboration, it’s another thing to just grind it out, doing tick the box writing. If you just churn stuff out without your heart and soul being in it and just pumping up the word count, you’re going to come unstuck because usually that’s really badly written and then it needs to be re-edited to make it match the standard of all the other bits of your book when you were at the top of your game. Try not to slog on with stuff. Do it when you’re in the zone and work hard then.