What I Learned From Writing My Latest Book Manuscript

Yesterday I finished my latest manuscript.

It's a romance novel and the first draft has come in a little shy of 50,000 words.

It's been an on-going project for some time now because I kept letting other things get in my way.

Eventually, I had to stop letting myself be distracted and get down to some serious writing and I learned quite a few things along the way about how to apply myself when I have a large project to complete.

And here are three of them:

1. Always do my book writing first. It's all too easy to put book writing as the last thing to do every day, and it's also too easy to let other things use up all my time so that there is no time left to write my book. Luckily I had a detailed outline to follow so I never lost where I was up to in the story, but it was still hard sometimes to pick up the story where I left off because I couldn't remember every detail that I'd previously written, like what did I say the weather was like or whether my characters had already discussed a certain detail.

2. Ignore procrastination and it will go away. It's all too easy to procrastinate and not get my writing done. The reason we procrastinate is that it's easy. It's much easier to do nothing than to work on a big writing project. But once I got over the feeling of wanting to procrastinate and got stuck into my work, I soon got lost in my writing and time just flew by. And because I'd done my book writing first, no matter what else happened for the rest of the day, my most important writing was done.

3. I need to do Deep Work. That is a phrase used by the author, Cal Newport in his book by the same name. Deep Work means to totally immerse yourself in what you're doing and not let little things distract you. It helps you to do more work in less time and to do better quality work. It's also called Deliberate Practice by some experts and is said to help neurons in the brain fire faster and cleaner thus cementing the skill you are working on which makes it easier and faster to do next time, which is how you get great at what you do.

So all I had to do was make sure I did my book writing first every day, ignore the feeling of wanting to procrastinate, and work deeply and not let anything distract me.

At first it wasn't easy, but after I'd done it a few times it no longer seemed hard.

I guess doing my deep work of book writing first, meant that every day I started how I wanted to go on.

And it worked.

And you can see from the picture at the top of the page, that I've printed out my manuscript ready for the first edit, which I'll start in a couple of days once I've put in some time distance so that I can read it with 'fresh' eyes.

If you're currently working on your own manuscript, I hope you can work deeply and distraction-free too.