Self Publish

Finish Your Book in a Year

Tips, Articles, and Posts on Finishing Your Book in a Year!

This Month’s Post:

New Year, New Habit

You started, then stopped, wrote for a while, excited to see progress, and then nothing. You put the pen down, notebook away, tablet on the shelf, and life continued.

It’s okay.

All writers go through this torment of having the story inside, starting on it, then feeling the struggle to put it down on paper. This year we will post blogs, tips, and encouragement each month to help – complete your book in a year.

Create a Writing Habit

You drive the same route to the [fill in the blank with daycare, school, work] each day for 60+ days. One day, you arrive at your destination and have very little recall of the drive between point A and point B. How did this happen? Your body, muscles and brain are doing behind the scenes work automatically.

Create a writing habit, or any habit, can take a minimum of 21 days or as long as 254 days, with an average of 66 days to make it automatic, according to a 2009 European Journal of Social Psychology study.

Creating a new writing habit, we need to go one step further.

According Psychology Today, citing a study from Japan, using a pen and paper to input our calendar schedule, instead of smartphone or tablet, sparks more activity in the creative part of our brains, increases memory recall and is faster.

Using these two brain factoids, here is your Finishing Your Book In A Year tip.

  1. Get a nice monthly calendar for this year.
  2. Take some color pencils or pens.
  3. Schedule 15 minutes for the next 14 days to sit and write – pen to paper.
  4. Write each day.

After 14 days, get your calendar and schedule 30 minutes for writing over the next 14 days block. You are now up to day 28. Repeat this pattern every 14 days.

By day 48 you should be writing an hour a day. By day 66? You are writing an hour and 15 minutes a day. By this time? You likely cannot go a day without writing – period.

P.S. I used this method of building a habit back in June. I started doing squats for two minutes a day while I brushed my teeth. It’s now January and when I start brushing my teeth, my body automatically does squats. (85-90 squats in two minutes)

It Really Works

It really works. So getting your book finished this year, get this writing habit automatically going. Good luck, happy habit building, and watch what amazing writing comes from your efforts.

Build Up Your Automatic Writing Habit!