Today, I’m going to talk about writing your first draft. Now, this is a really exciting part because you’ve done all the pre-work, you’ve done all the preparation work in the steps that I’ve talked about before, and you are now at the point where you’re ready to actually start writing. 

Sometimes people get blocked at this point because they think, “Oh, my goodness. Now I actually have to do it.” Well, yes you do. And there are ways you can it make it easy for yourself. 

First of all, remember it is just the first draft. I’m going to quote the great Ernest Hemmingway here, and please pardon the language, which is his and not mine. But Hemmingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” And if it’s true of Hemmingway, I think you can assume that it’s going to be true for the rest of us. If you think of it that way, it takes a lot of the pressure off. It doesn’t have to be great. It is going to be considerably worked on after this.

But let’s give you some ideas as to how you might attack writing your first draft. 

The first principle to remember is, when you’re writing, don’t edit. You can, of course, edit as you write because of the technology, but don’t do it. Writing and editing are two different things and they actually use two different parts of your brain. If you keep editing as you go, that way lies insanity. You’ll never get finished. 

Get the words down and then forget about them. Don’t even go back and read them again if you’re going to be tempted to change them. 

The next thing is, even though your subjects have been set out in your table of contents in the order they’re going to show up in your book, that doesn’t mean you have to write them in that order. 

I always say to people, “There are certain parts of your material that you know very well, that you know better than any of the other parts. If that’s the case, those are the parts to write first, even if means starting with Chapter 7.” 

Write that part first because once you start on that and you get that chapter done, it’ll sort of grease the wheels and help you to go and do the other more difficult chapters.

Now, I don’t know how much time you’re going to devote to writing your book. Only you know that. And I know that some of the folks who are watching have fulltime jobs and you can’t write fulltime, you can’t write all the time. But you do need to decide how much time. 

If it’s going to be an hour a day, or half an hour a day, whatever it is that you think that you can safely manage, I recommend you set a specific time during the day to do it. And make sure that you go to a different place usually. Maybe it’s a different room in your house. 

For me, I quite often write in a café because it takes me away from my usual ambiance and it helps me to write because I know that’s what I’m there for. So, go to your writing place and actually start writing. 

Set a timer for whatever amount of time you’ve allowed yourself, and even if it’s only 15 minutes or half an hour, write for that amount of time and then stop. When you’re following what’s in your table of contents, you’ll be surprised at how it actually starts to add up. I like to use Scrivener for writing my books, but you can also use Microsoft Word, and they both have a tool that lets you count the words so you can see your progress as you go along. I recommend you switch on that tool and keep track of how many words you’ve written in each session.

Once you’ve been doing this for a few days and you realize how much you actually get written in a certain amount of time, from that you can figure out how long it’s going to take you to write each chapter, and then from there, how long it’s going to take you to write the first draft of the entire book, and then that becomes your target. 

As you work your way through your half hour, or your one hour, or your half a day, whatever you can manage, every day or every week, you can see your progress towards whether you’re going to hit your word target or not. Most professional authors, especially novelists, actually have word targets for every day, and they don’t stop till they’ve written the set number of words. That may or may not work for you. I think, especially for new writers and especially for nonfiction, the word count isn’t as important as covering the material. But in any case, your task, over the next whatever amount of time it takes, is to hit the certain writing targets. Once you’ve figured out this is how long it’s going to take you to write a chapter, then it’s your job to hit that target by that specific date you hope to have finished that chapter. Now, if that date comes and goes and you haven’t hit it, never mind, just carry on and eventually you will.

Once you’ve done one chapter, close the books and celebrate. Give yourself a pat on the back, take yourself out for dinner, do something because you have gone further than most other people do. And then you can easily go on and do the same again for the next chapter. 

Happy Writing, and I’ll talk to you next week.