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This is Elizabeth Stark in the Book Writing World. Welcome to Write Your Book, Week 11.
Congratulations! You have been writing. Many people want to be writers, but most of them want to have written rather than to write. You are an athlete, your fingers moving across the keys or moving the pen across the page.
We started this term by thinking about your process: how do you get things done? How can you support your process, rather than change it? Looking back over the past months, how have you leaned into and propped up your own individual way of writing? What have you learned about what inspires you? What goals are most effective for motivating you? What kinds of thinking about your book have fed the writing?
And what disrupted you? What have you learned about what to avoid?
Finally, what’s next? If you have a complete draft of your book, you are ready to move onto the “Revise Your Book” course. This will begin with your taking some time away from the manuscript and instead reading books you love, books that inspire you, before you return to your book and attempt to read it as a stranger.
If you are still writing—for a book is a long ocean to swim, and pacing and sustaining yourself for the duration is its own art—you are getting ready to dive back into “Write Your Book” course, round 2 (or 3 or 4). Don’t lose your momentum. If you’ve hit your stride, keep going. If you need help to hit your stride, reach out for it.
You also have the option of returning to the “Plan Your Book” course if you think that this kind of analysis will fuel your forward momentum as you write or if you are feeling a fissure opening in your plot and plan that needs to be addressed.
Writing a book includes planning, writing, rewriting, rethinking, replanning, writing some more, polishing and finally, finally, sending it out into the world, done. The Book Writing World is set up so that you can cycle in and out of the courses in the way that best suits your needs as a writer.
Your assignment:
1) Articulate the weekly (or daily) goal that works the best for you. Is it 1.5 hours a day in the morning? Or a half hour in the evening? Is it 1000 words a week? Or 1000 words a day? Do you have a steady rhythm and pace to your writing production? If not, why not? And what goal do you think would work best for you? You want to hit a pace of steady progress, whether that’s writing all day once a week or a page every day or something else.
2) Answer the questions asked in this lecture: What have your learned about your process? What inspires, motivates and feeds your writing? What disrupts it? And what is next?