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Learn to set deadlines early in your writing career. You might use competitions and funding applications to do this for you. You might enquire when someone you hope to read the manuscript will have time to do so, and work on getting as far as you can with the manuscript before you hand it over to them.
A practical approach is to work out how long it takes you to write a certain number of words. How many you choose depends on how much time you have for your writing. If you regularly have half days free to write this might be 1,000 words; if you have only a few hours at a time this might be 500 words.
Hopefully you have an idea of how long you want your manuscript to be. 70,000 words? 100,000 words?
Once you have an idea of this, and how long it takes you to write 1,000 words you can block this into your diary. So for every afternoon blocked off as writing time you would aim to write 1,000 words. And for writers with just a few hours free each writing session, you would know that at the end of each two session you would have achieved 1,000 words.
From this you can set staging posts. You’ll know when you expect to have written the material for the first third of your novel, the first half, and your full draft. You may also decide to factor in some time for revising the text after reaching the different stages.
It’s amazing what it can do for your motivation levels to realize it takes just 30 writing sessions to get to the half-way point or to complete your first full draft.
This is just one approach to keeping motivated and on deadline. I’d like to include some of your own experiences, so if anyone has any further tips on creating, or dealing with, deadlines, or on how to remain motivated, which they would like to appear on this site, email them to:
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