Driving back from Christmas vacation in Leavenworth, Washington with my wife and son yesterday, we started discussing New Year’s resolutions. I decided my goal is to finish the first draft of my book in 2020. I’ve been researching and plotting and writing for the past year, but I haven’t progressed beyond the first four chapters, because I keep going back to redo what I’ve already written. I realized that if I ever want to finish the book, I have to change my approach.

Andrew asked me what it would take to get it done. I’m planning for 23 chapters, so that’s 19 more chapters that I need to get written in the next 12 months. The only way I’ll accomplish that is if I commit to writing a new chapter every two to three weeks. And to do that, I need to focus on writing some new material every week.

Typically I go to the coffee shop, relax for a while, and then, when I’m ready to start writing, I go back and reread what I’ve written so far, and I see everything that’s wrong with it. So I tackle that first. I can spend hours rewriting a single paragraph, trying to get the words just right. I’m writing, but I’m not progressing on the story.

It’s hard for me to sit down at a blank page and start writing the next scene – by far the hardest part of being a writer. It’s much easier to edit what I’ve already written.

So – going forward – I’m going to force myself to write the new material before I start revising. The first version might not be good, but if I put something new down on the page every day, then in a week I’ll have a new chapter written, and I can go back and edit it for another week, and then start on the next chapter. That’s how I’m going to meet my goal, and finish my book in 2020.

Michael