It’s been 20 months since I last worked on a fictional manuscript, and over 20 years since I worked on a book that didn’t involve characters from my series, Blackbirch.

So, naturally, I’ve been very eager to sit down at my writing desk, start a work in progress, and get creative with a new story. Also, naturally, I’ve been trying to start this process for a few months now and procrastinating all the way.

Why authors do this to themselves, I don’t know. What I do know is that spending a few hours on a Tuesday in April making notes for an untitled Scrivener project, and then using a Thursday morning in June to add 84 words to a paragraph I penned back in January does not a book make.

I’ve been procrastinating hard, and if you’ve been doing the same, here are 5 tips to get you started on actually starting your WIP, and to help you curb your procrastination habits!

Did I create, edit, and release two writing craft books during the time I had to start my new WIP? Yes, I did. Did I keep blogging, creating social media content, and posting said content to multiple accounts regularly? Yes, I did. Did I use those things as a reason to delay starting and continuing to work on my WIP? Yes. Yes, I did.

I’ve had the time in the last 20 months to work on this new WIP and my regular writing content/commitments, and most of the time, I did my utmost best to self-sabotage any decent progress.

I convinced myself I had to have the other books completed and released and all of my blogs for the rest of this year drafted before I could work solidly on my WIP—and that’s just not true. I can, and should have been doing both.

If you have a similar self-sabotage story, or know in your writer heart-of-hearts what you do to delay writing your own WIP, the time to get over that mindset is now.

Identify your self-sabotage, banish it, and commit to making your new WIP your priority, and then get to work. It’s the only way your WIP will get written.

If you’re really struggling to get into things, sometimes your writing brain needs a creative reset.

This happened to me recently, by accident. The only progress I was making on my WIP was writing down notes every few days and telling myself that was enough. Then I got an awful cold.

It was so bad; I spent the best part of the week in bed doing nothing but listening to audiobooks and living on cold relief meds to ease the sinus pain and headaches.

The time away from thinking about my work in progress, from blogging, and from checking and posting on social media gave me a brief break, and the reset was something I didn’t know I needed until it happened.

The time away from all things creative allowed me to feel more creative when I came back, so take an actual break, for a week or a weekend.

Don’t take down notes or check social media. Just do things that aren’t writing/authoring and see if it also helps you come back to your words refreshed and ready to get some proper work done.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know I love a writing routine almost as much as I love a checklist and a to-do list.

All three things keep me on track, and while I had one to stay on top of my blogging and social media content, I didn’t have one for my WIP.

Because I was keeping myself in the “planning” stage, I hadn’t actually created a routine to accomplish any writing.

Vaguely telling myself to “write” when I had the chance to get to my desk wasn’t really cutting it, and I was still prioritizing my procrasta-writing of blogs and content, so I knew it was time to set up an actual routine to follow through on. This led me back to my Time Blocking Routine, where I alternate writing and authoring tasks over two different weeks.

This kind of routine helps simplify tasks, gives equal time to them, and ensures I’m not struggling to do everything and not making progress on anything.

If you’d like to do the same, check out my writing routine blogs here, and see if there’s one or a combination that you can use to create your own routine and get your WIP on track.

Just like a vague goal to “write” often results in very little specific progress, not setting a deadline doesn’t help either.

I know this well after starting this year with a generic New Year goal of “writing my WIP” and then only working on it for a few hours across random days in the last 6 months. If I had given myself a deadline of completing the first draft in 6 months (as I have now), I’m sure I would have achieved it, or at the very least, drafted a sizeable chunk of it.

The deadline of a specific period and the firm goal of a first draft are more tangible—and therefore doable—so never underestimate the strength of a goal and a deadline. Sometimes, they’re all you need to get started.

So now that you’ve made plans to identify your self-sabotaging ways, reset your writing brain, created a writing routine that works for you, and given yourself a deadline and goal to strive for, it’s time to do what everything has been building to—write!

Yes, it’s true. To create a book, you have to write it. But if you’ve been having the trouble I’ve been having when it comes to making progress on your WIP, diving right into things can be overwhelming and send you right back to your procrastinating ways.

To get around it, go small and just write 200-500 words a day for the first few weeks. It’s a small amount, basically a few paragraphs, but it should be enough to get you back into writing. It can also be done first thing in the morning, last thing before bed, during your lunch hour, on the commute to or from work, or while in between school activities and drop-offs.

A small start should also make you more eager to work on your WIP. Then, once you’re regularly making progress, up the count.

Keep going until you’ve found that writing flow that gets you to your writing sessions in the mood to create and replace your procrastinating ways with genuine progress to get that WIP started and then finished. You’ve got this!

— K.M. Allan

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