As you see above, I passed the 400-page mark of Book No. 3 recently. I'll finish the manuscript soon(ish) and the sheer joy writing gives me: I mean, I would pay for the privilege, instead of it being the other way around.

I didn't always feel this way. Writing books, writing anything long, used to terrify me, paralyze me.

The worst were the projects I started and then dropped. I always had the best intentions but fear or doubt or far more often life intervened, with its demands on time I could otherwise give to writing.

I felt horrible with each abandoned project.

If you're nodding right now—and I suspect you are: abandoned projects and not having time to write are the two complaints I hear most on book tour from would-be authors in the crowd, and from the clients I now advise—I want you to try three things that worked for me before I wrote any book.

In fact, these three tips led me to write books No. 1 and 2 and to get to the 400-page mark of Book No. 3 and to love the process so much that, as I told Ryan Holiday, I'd prefer to write even on vacation these days.



Tip No. 1 for sticking with that big honking writing project: Start small.

Start with a page of writing, or less than that, 250 words of writing, or less than that: a half hour of your time.

Most people think you need vast amounts of time to write something big and ambitious. You don't.

You need a little bit of time, every day.

Give yourself something manageable, with you yourself defining manageable. Don't be ambitious at the outset with how much you plan to write. That'll only lead to an abandoned project weeks or months from now.

Instead, be honest. How much time in your existing schedule could you give to writing each day, five or six days a week?

Then give yourself that time.




Tip No. 2 for sticking with that big honking writing project: Be a plumber.

A guy I'm helping writing a feature-film script said to me this week, "I'm not inspired any more. Every day I sit down to write and it feels like work."

Damn right. It is work.

Some people think they'll write when the muse visits them. That's a terrible practice. You'll never finish anything big or ambitious working like that.

Instead, as I told the screenwriter this week, be a plumber. Show up for work every day. On the days when the writing you've produced sucks, take pride in the notion that at least you came to work.

At least you wrote something. You know you doesn't write? Every writer who says he's going to and then finds excuses.

Don't settle for excuses. Settle yourself in your seat.

Tip No. 3 for sticking with that big honking writing project: Write today. Edit what you wrote tomorrow. Then write tomorrow.

You will get stuck. You'll get to the point where you think, "I don't know how the story moves forward."

Write that next thing anyway.

As you write, tell yourself, "Whatever I'm writing today I can edit and improve tomorrow."

This is huge. So often writers think they have to perfect their writing each day. They don't.

The best part of writing is rewriting. You get to come back and read that stuff tomorrow and improve what's not working.

The second best part of writing is the rewriting that happens after your first full draft. You get to review everything and see what's holding together and improve what's not.

These are liberating ideas. Not only do you not have to perfect today's writing, you don't even need to have a flawless first draft.

I'm so proud of this Esquire story. It took seven drafts to get right. I'm so proud of both published books. Each took at least four drafts to nail.

Writing is rewriting, endless rewriting, and at every step of the writing process.

Here's my daily three-step work flow, to prove that point.

1) I review what I wrote yesterday and improve it as necessary.

This allows me to get into flow.

2) I write at least 500 new words of text.

The 500 works for me. Stephen King's daily output is 1,000 words. Some writers write for a couple hours a day. Some a half hour. The size of the output doesn't matter.

The output itself matters.

3) I quit writing for the day by mapping out what I plan to write tomorrow.

This mapping out and structuring for tomorrow gives me momentum. I can return to the writing the next day without the feeling that I'm staring at a blank screen with no sense of how I'll proceed.

When I sit down the next morning and open my laptop, the process repeats itself:

I start by reviewing what I wrote yesterday.




These three tips have led to a process that's less a process than my life's purpose. Not every day is great, but I want you to feel as satisfied by the writing life as I do.

Writers need to write. If you're in pain because you're not writing the thing you should be, at the length it should be, with the ambition you have within you, here's how you alleviate that pain and set yourself to writing.