First, do you consider yourself a writer or an author or just a wannabe? Because I have to let you know, the only difference between any of those is how much you produce. Authors don’t produce anymore. They’re done. Writers do that forever. Everyone else is trying to be a writer, whether or not they believe it. Anyway, how do they write?
Well, I’ll have to go back to the self publishing podcast guys, Johnny, Sean and Dave and a lot of what they talk about is captured in their latest non-fiction book called “Write, Publish, Repeat,” and that title, in and of itself, is the formula for how prolific, successful writers write. They don’t think about it too much.
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They do their outline, they do their planning up front, which could take a day or two, maybe even a week to get the general flow of things down. Then they put butt in chair for the next couple of weeks or months until the content is there, the first draft is down, not editing too harshly along the way, then going back with a realistic and critical mind frame to fix the typos, proofread, get stuff done, maybe even send it out to a couple of people to proofread too.
Then it’s polish, language, making it nice and neat and all the other stuff is publishing nuances that are part of the publishing process but not necessarily writing. I know nobody wants to hear it and that’s probably why you’re searching for this video because you’ve heard this answer before and just aren’t happy with it, but it is a matter of doing your proper planning up front and setting a dedicated amount of time, at least five times a week.
Treat it literally like a job, whether it’s a part time job or not, to where you’re setting up that habit, you have the same work environment, you’ve got your same methods, your rhythm and you know that no matter what, you’re going to put in your hour or two or do it word wise and aim for your 1,000 or 2,000 words per day and just rinse and repeat.
When you’re done, do it again. When you’re done, do it again. When you’re done, do it again.
That’s what it is. There is no complex formula to it. The biggest factors are motivation and dedication. The rest is just you translating your thoughts to words. They’re going to be crap up front. You’re going to polish and clean them up later. That’s the way it works. Writers write. And they write. And they write. Stop searching for the answer. You should be writing now.
Get your motivation up. Get that book that I mentioned, “Write, Publish, Repeat,” too. There are several others that are good too that you will probably see in the recommendations on Amazon. Stephen King’s “On Writing” is good, and “On Writing Well,” – I forget who wrote it. “Bird by Bird,” which is a punch in the face but good so far. I’m not completely done with it.
Get your motivation up and just start writing. I really can’t say much more than that.