What I Learned Writing 24k Words in 5 Days

If you’re struggling with your book, you need to surrender yourself to your story. You don’t have to give up — you really shouldn’t do that. But you might just need to surrender yourself to let the story go where it wants to.

If you’ve been writing for a long while and fiction is your passion, you probably have a bunch of book ideas kicking around. You might have even started the manuscripts, but you hit a brick wall and you just haven’t been able to finish them. Life gets in the way and may slow you down, but if you’re struggling with the motivation to write that book, there might just be a deeper reason for that.

When you’re stuck, a writing sprint can help get you moving.

Writing sprints can be incredibly helpful in jumpstarting your book. Harvard Business Review shares how sprints can help you get more done by focusing on what is most important and expediting decision making. They’re looking at sprints from a more business-oriented perspective, as you might expect given it’s the HBR.

Sprints might be a workforce technique, but they can be transformative to your creative writing. These conceptions aren’t separate islands from each other; there are plenty of organized writing sprints every year, such as National Novel Writing Month. Pushing yourself to try your own sprint can breathe fresh life into your stagnant story.

If you get stuck on things like decision making and or picking up on something after it’s been sitting for a long while, a sprint can help you get started or restarted. Since you’re working hard, you can move from something abstract to something concrete much faster.

Take a hard look at your book and figure out why you’re unmotivated to work on it.

If you haven’t been making progress, there’s a reason for that. This is an evaluation process that isn’t fun to take, but it’s vital if you want to be a prolific writer. You aren’t motivated to work on this book. There’s some reason why you’ve disconnected from the project. But why? What’s holding you back?

It might take time and thought to find an answer to this question, but this self-critique and self-introspection can come in handy.

It could be that you were once excited about this idea, but you’ve just lost interest now.

Our feelings, preferences, and lives change all the time. This will unavoidably impact your writing. Creating a novel from start to finish is a process. If you’ve halted somewhere, it’s time to look at this process and figure out where those mental mechanisms are getting stuck.

Pretend you’re troubleshooting a problem on your computer. You are the IT professional and your book is the unruly computer. Sort out all the possible problems leading to your demotivation and figure out why it isn’t working.

Once you’ve identified the problem, start making changes.

This part of the process is very personal to the book you’re writing and the story you truly want to tell. Since this is going to vary a lot, I’m going to explain how this unfolded for me to give you a clearer idea of what this could mean for you.

I started a story in 2016 for National Novel Writing Month and I only managed to write about 20,000 words. This book was a historical romance with a fantasy twist rooted in folklore myths of New Jersey. It was an idea that I’d been kicking around since 2012 and I finally decided to put pen to paper.

The fact that I sat on this idea for 4 years before I started writing is already a big red flag.

I didn’t see this then, but clearly, there was something about it that wasn’t motivating me. I’ve poked at the book in the years since. In the additional 4 years since I started writing it, I pulled teeth and got it up to 47,000 words. It was slow going with pauses that lasted for months.

But there’s a lesson here.

The problem all along was that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with those fantasy and folklore elements.

Finally, this year, I picked it up again. I started writing, focusing solely on the romance and the politics of the era. I somehow churned out 24,000 words in 5 days. This might be the most productive writing sprint I’ve had in my life. It’s a rough draft, I’m not worried about editing just yet.

Though they were part of the original core idea, I’m rewriting my outline and I’m pressing onward with what is working for this book. The story decided to take control and I’m going to happily surrender to it. In the end, it’s going to make for a stronger book and a better experience for future readers.

Write the parts of the story you love the most and see where they take you.

The story you think you’re going in to write might not be the story you really want. If there’s something in that story or in your original premise that is making you demotivated, it’s time to consider dropping it.

If you’re not sure what the new direction you want to take the book in, try writing more of your favorite parts of the story. That might be scenes with a certain character, chapters at a certain point in your story’s timeline, or focusing on certain plot elements.

Experiment. Write, take different approaches, and see what works.

When you find something that you can sit down and write each day without fighting yourself, that’s the part of the book that needs to be at the forefront of your story. It’s time to revise your outline, accept changes to your plans, and write the book that you truly want to.

Don’t become too devoted to your original idea. It’s okay if your story ideas grow with you and change over time. If you’ve been stagnant on your book for a long while, it might be time to surrender. Take these steps, figure out what you really want to write, and put your best effort into crafting that story to share with the world.