0.02 Hearthside: How to Finish the Damn Thing

Everywhere I go, I meet people who tell me they want to write a book. They have the ideas, the motivation, but they just can’t seem to finish a draft. It is probably the greatest challenge I see across writing circles and social media.

This is no attempt to shame those folks. Writing novels is not only arduous and painstaking, it’s one of the hardest art forms to share. When I was a performer, I could scratch out the bones of a song in a couple hours, put together a rough guitar progression and play it for someone all in the same night. Most people were happy to give me immediate feedback since I was only asking for three to four minutes of their time. It’s another matter to drop a 400-page book in someone’s lap and ask them to spend the next weeks to months reading it.

Most of the work we do as writers is solitary by necessity. We stare at a page and hallucinate, try to invent new worlds with nothing but 26 letters and a dream. The pressure to be successful, to be understood, is immense.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to finish your book; you may have a hundred reasons for why you haven’t been able to and 99 of them could be completely valid. What I can offer, as someone who has written nine books to completion (at the time of writing this post), are five tips I’ve picked up for how to get yourself across that first finish line.

Tip 1: You Gotta Write It

Yes, we’re getting the cheeky one out of the way first, and if your eyes are already rolling, stick with me. Taking on any new art form requires practice. If you wanted to learn how to draw, you’d buy a cheap sketchbook and set aside a little time every day or week to draw the things you see on the bus or in your living room. The practice of writing books can feel a little more overwhelming because it’s not something you can whip up in an hour or even a weekend.

It's why many people start off with short form narratives. You practice a much more condensed version of crafting a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and you can finish it in a much timelier fashion. Yet even if you’ve cut your teeth on short stories and essays, when it comes to writing full length novels, there aren’t any shortcuts. To learn how to do it, you have to do it.

If you want to write that novel, you need to prioritize it. Set aside fifteen, twenty minutes of your day where you open the document and write. Set a small goal to start: 100 words (the length of an average paragraph). If you meet it or surpass it, spectacular! If you only manage 50, hey! That’s 50 words that weren’t on the page previously. Writing novels is a boss level fight and you can’t save yourself for when the inspiration strikes to land a big power move, and knock out 10,000 words in a single sitting. You have to hack at it with your shitty little sword and whittle it down piece by piece. Word by word.

There are going to be days you open the document and nothing comes of it. That’s alright! What matters is you’re trying, you’re putting other distractions aside, and making a consistent effort. That’s a whole lot better than waiting for the stars to align (because trust me, they never will).

We live in a world wrought with stimulation: loud ads, addictive social media sink holes, that comfort video game, that favorite TV show. Those vices will always be there to taunt you, and you have to make the choice to write instead. Not every time. You’re allowed to enjoy things, still, I promise. But if you find yourself spending your four hours of free time a night binging television or scrolling Reddit, dedicate one of those hours to writing and reward yourself with something fun after. It’s the only way the thing is going to get done.

Tip 2: Find a Sprinting Buddy

There are so many reasons to seek community as a writer. Other writers help you grow, they give you safe places to brainstorm ideas, to get vibe checks, to find beta readers. For how lonely writing can be, I can’t begin to tell you the difference it makes to surround yourself with people who are struggling through the same process you are. You can cheer each other on, hype each other up when the doubt and fatigue set in, even write “side-by-side.”

Most writers are holed up in their homes or favorite coffee shops to do their work, but online spaces like Discord or other texting platforms can allow you to schedule times to write together. In many groups these are called “Sprints.” Discord specifically allows a bot that sets timers; you get a notification to Go and another to Stop when time is up. It can even tally your word count for that sprint.

Sprints are a great way to lock in your focus. Set a goal of 15 or 20 minutes, where you write as much as you can. Doing them with other writers injects a bit of fun and camaraderie into the process. We don’t make it a true competition in my group—and we get a good laugh when someone hits a stride and gets a crazy high word count. It’s just about having someone to sit in the trenches with you. That alone can take a lot of the pressure off.

Tip 3: Keep Reading

Believe me, I know how challenging it can be to keep up with reading goals when you’re spending so much energy writing your own stuff. My eyes get fatigued after staring at screens and thinking about words for hours at a time. Some days the last thing I want is to look at even more words.

Yet there are moments, particularly after you’ve been hacking away at your manuscript for months on end, where you start to lose the forest for the trees. You don’t know if the sentences sound good or not, and everything melds together in your mind. This is a prime time to put it aside for a bit and pick up a book.

Reading published books, particularly something you really enjoy, is like a cold glass of water in the height of summer. You can switch off the creation brain and enjoy the work of someone who has mastered the art form. I guarantee it will revitalize you to write your own stuff, and you will be able to “hear” your own prose again. Hydrate that brain!

I find it wholly bizarre, but there has been a rise in online spaces where people get quite bent out of shape when you suggest the only way to write good books is to read good books. I don’t understand this position; it’s like claiming you want to direct films while hating movies, or wanting to be an architect without learning how to make structurally sound buildings that won’t just topple over at a stiff breeze.

To put a finer point on it, you have to do this for the love. As much as we writers may bitch and moan about the agony of the process, we do this because we love stories and we love writing them. You gotta have love, or it won’t happen. And it’s not just love for your own work, but for the art form itself.

So keep reading! Study what others do. If you love the way that author writes characters, plots, or dialogue, ask yourself why it works. Then steal their techniques.

Tip 4: Ask Yourself “What’s Not Working?”

Sometimes you hit a wall. Over the course of a book, I will hit several, repeatedly. Maybe it’s a transition scene, an action sequence you aren’t sure how to choreograph, a slow point in the narrative that makes you want to gnaw your own foot off to escape the trap of this goddamn story.

Been there. Every writer faces these, and it can be a matter of brute forcing your way through the scene. But occasionally, we hit these walls because something in the narrative isn’t working. A tip I heard years ago suggested that if you can’t figure out what to say next, the problem is with the last sentence you wrote. Try deleting it, even the last paragraph, and see if that relieves the blockage.

Other times, it’s not the fault of the last few lines, but a choice in the narrative. Maybe there’s a character you don’t need who’s proving to be dead weight. Maybe you’re bored and you need to raise the stakes. Boredom can be a great indication that there’s a problem, because if you don’t care what’s happening in the scene, odds are the reader won’t either. Are you stumped on how an action sequence should look? Watch some reference videos, learn how people explain it (or again, seek a published book that’s done it well and analyze what the author did).

Ask yourself why this scene is so hard to write. Identify the problem. If you simply don’t know what should happen next, it could be time to write an outline.

If you’re a “pantser” (that is, a writer who doesn’t like to outline and instead flies by the seat of their pants), you may clutch your pearls, but I will hold your hand as I say this: outlines are a life saver. It can be incredibly freeing to have a document where you don’t need to write beautifully, just hash out ideas for what happens next: where we need to go, what we need to attain, what the setbacks are, rinse and repeat. I write fairly detailed outlines, and there is still plenty of room for discovery writing. 

Diagnosing the problem will not only help you overcome it, you’ll become a better writer in the process.

Tip 5: Let it Be Bad

Listen, I am an editor by trade. Revisions are my favorite part of the process. My biggest struggle with drafting is learning to switch off the “editor brain” and stop fretting over how good or bad my sentences are. The curse of bettering your craft is you will become keenly aware when you’re writing ugly lines or awkward transitions, and it will drive you nuts.

My biggest self-inflicted bear trap is going back to the first chapters to reread what I’ve done. To “refresh my recollection,” I say to myself, knowing what a lie that is. I then get absorbed in revising those first chapters—I can’t help it! I see the errors, I know exactly how to fix them, so I do! Left unchecked, this impulse sets you up for a terrible loop of constantly refining what you’ve written while never writing anything new.

It feels productive—you’re making the writing better! What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what I tell you to do on this blog? I have used these tricks on my brain so many times, it’s embarrassing. The fact is that the book will never get done if you spend all your time revising what you’ve already written. (Believe me, if you could, I’d have done it by now.)

The only way I can ever get through a first draft is by setting a hard line for myself: I am not allowed to go back and reread. I’m not allowed to change anything I’ve done. If I realize I want to drop a character, change somebody’s age or personality, or some big world detail, I make a note for myself in the margins and keep writing as if I’ve already revised the rest of the document.

Above all, you have to allow yourself to write badly. You’re gonna put down some clunkers. That world building is going to be a rusty scaffolding, your side characters are going to feel hollow and one dimensional, and that’s good! Let them be! Let the book be bad because the only purpose of a first draft is to exist. Make a mess of the canvas, put all the colors down, and once you get to the end, then you can go back and fix those holes you left for yourself.

Let it be bad and keep your sights forward. You got this.

Recap:

• Set aside the time to write. You have to choose and prioritize writing, or it will never get done.

• It’s better to make small consistent efforts than wait for the “right head space” and perfect conditions—those stars will never align.

• Build relationships with other writers and consider sprinting together! It helps to have a comrade who knows what you’re going through.

• Read. Read books to revitalize yourself. Read them to study the craft. Steal the techniques you admire in other writers!

• Analyze what isn’t working when you’ve hit a wall. Is it the last few sentences? Is it a greater issue with the story itself? Learn how to diagnose these blockages.

• Consider writing an outline. Give yourself a road map for what happens next.

• Give yourself the grace to write a bad book. Write clunky sentences. The purpose of a first draft is only to exist. Making it good is what revisions are for. 

• Don’t get stuck in the trap of revising what you’ve already written. It will prevent you from writing anything new.