To be a writer, you need only write. Sit down, put pen to paper, and voila. You are a writer of something. But to become a published writer, an author, you need to finish a project once in a while.
In a post on DIY MFA, Olivia Fisher shares her struggle with finishing various novel projects and offers some suggestions for getting to the end zone. “Currently, I have written over 85,000 words total on ten different novel projects,” Fisher writes. “Why is it that I have so many novels and none of them are finished? I realized why as I was talking with my friend: I tinker too much and won’t let myself be finished.”
A lot of writers edit as they write [ed. note: guilty]. “But that’s not how writing works, and it certainly isn’t how good writing works,” Fisher says. [ed. note: we disagree, but let’s go with it.]
To actually finish your project, Fisher suggests the following steps:
- Quiet your inner editor. “You need to lock your inner editor out of your writing space until it’s time to bring them back,” Fisher says. “When you write, even if it makes no sense, resist the urge to stop and fix it or brainstorm a better way for a scene to unfold. Remind yourself that your goal is to finish, not to finish perfectly.”
- Focus on progress, not the clock. Many of us have busy lives that make it harder to set aside a specific time every day to write. We won’t have the perfect seating arrangement and snacks and two hours of quiet time. If that’s you, focus on writing when you can – on your lunch hour or waiting in line. Keep a notebook with you to jot down ideas, dialogue, and phrases. Make this a priority and eventually the words will start adding up.
- Set a reasonable deadline. “Over the last six months, I’ve only managed to add around 7K words to my novel, and when I realized that, I was shocked,” Fisher writes. “I had been setting bad deadlines for myself with unrealistic progress expectations.” This year, she’s set a goal of writing 1,000 words every week, which should allow her to finish her novel draft by the end of 2022.
