Intro

There have been times during many people’s lives that they have realized that they wanted to tackle a big project. For me, that project was that I wanted to write a book, but thinking back to my time in school, I knew that it likely would be difficult for me as I tended to struggle in English class as I couldn’t figure out how to write the way that my teachers wanted me to. Add to my lack of structure, a plethora of grammatical errors and spelling gaffes, and you get a good idea of how bad my writing was.

Then when I decided I wanted to write a book, I knew some of what I was up against. I also knew that I couldn’t let my fear get the better of me, but that if it was something that I wanted to do, then I would just have to sit down and do the work, and I could worry later about trying to make it better.

Throughout the process of writing my first novel, there were several things that I learned, but I want to share five of them with you today and hopefully they can help you with any projects that you have coming up. While I am writing these from the perspective of writing a book, these lessons would apply to any field.

I don’t know what I am doing

Not knowing exactly what I was doing was one of the first things that I learned while working on this project. Luckily, I was able to realize that I didn’t know what I was doing, and as such, I could find books and other resources that would help me along the path. I am sure that many of you have learned that you don’t know what you are doing either when it comes to starting a new project or following a passion of yours that you have never done before.

Not knowing what you are doing can leave you as confused as a dog with a bowtie, but that’s why it’s okay to find resources or people who are willing to give you information. Especially with the rise of the internet and the availability of resources that surround us, there should be no reason to ever let a lack of knowledge about something keep you from pursuing what you want to try. From books to YouTube to even blog articles about how to do things, there are plenty of ways to acquire knowledge about a topic and see if it is something that you would like to pursue.

When writing my book, I turned to other writers who had successfully written and published books, knowing that they would have the experience needed to help me along my path. One of the most beneficial books I read was Published by Chandler Bolt who is the founder of Self Publishing School. While I didn’t go through his school, I was able to read his book and gather valuable information on how to write and publish a book.

Even as I move closer to releasing the book that I have been working on into the wild and letting other people read it (gasp), I know that I still haven’t learned everything, and that’s okay. No one is saying that it has to be perfect, and just because I hit the button that says publish doesn’t mean that I have to stop learning. I will continue learning as long as I desire to gather information.

Time Management and Focus

One thing that I didn’t think about as much as I should have was how much time and focus it would take to write a book. I am used to just sitting down and writing here or there, and never spending more than thirty minutes to an hour working on something, and usually it is good enough that I am happy enough with it.

When writing a book, I came to realize that it was going to take time, and a lot of it. If I wanted to get this book written, then I knew that I was going to have to take time routinely out of my day to be able to work on it. It isn’t just something that I can throw together in a weekend, but rather it is something that I knew I was going to have to work on every day for months. My book is around 100k words, and even if I was to only write 2,000 words a day, it would still take me 50 days to write the first draft, not to mention that there were several days where I just couldn’t find the time to get my writing done.

With carving out the time to work on my book, I had to make the conscious decision that I was going to work on it, and that it was going to be my project of focus. There are so many other things that I enjoy doing that always managed to find their way into my daily schedule leaving me with no time to do the thing that I actually wanted to accomplish. Sure I can work at getting better at playing the piano or even reading more books, but if I didn’t make it a priority to work on my writing everyday, then it just wouldn’t get done.

Throughout this process I learned how to better manage my time, and that it is okay to tell myself that sometimes things just have to be put on the back burner so that they don’t take up too much time, energy, and focus. If you want to start a new hobby, or even a new business, you must be prepared that there will be many times when you want to do something else. It is in these moments when you will be challenged on how important your goals are to you. My best bit of advice is that you should take the time before you are tempted to do something else to decide that you are actually going to do the thing that you said that you are going to.

Writing Something is better than writing perfect

I have heard it said many times that you can’t edit a blank page. Additionally, I have heard it said that the best writer is someone who knows how to edit well. Both of these quotes are making the same point: it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time you do something, but rather by taking the time to do something the first time, you give yourself room for improvement.

As a writer, I know that the blank page can be quite a daunting challenge. There are so many things that you can do, but knowing where to start can be the hard part. Who says that the first thing you write has to be the thing that the readers actually see in the final version? No one. That’s why we have editing to allow us to make the mistakes early and often, but knowing that we can go back and fix our mistakes to make it better.

Too many times we can get stuck in the mindset that things have to be just so if we are to be happy with them. By desiring things to be perfect the first time, we often never take the first step that we need to even get started. Musicians are never the excellent musicians we think of them as the first time they sit down at a piano or the first time they try singing, but with practice they become the artists that can perform in front of thousands of people and wow the crowds with their talents.

This just goes to show what practice can do. Sure the first several times of doing something will go poorly, but that’s okay. Every time you mess up is just one more chance for you to learn to do things the right way the next time. Going back to one of the things I spoke about earlier, it’s okay to not know what you are doing. You just need to learn enough to know where to start, and then you can learn the rest over time using each mistake as a springboard to help launch you to a better future.

If you have been trying to start a business or even learn a new skill, I highly recommend just jumping in and learning from there. It doesn’t have to be pretty the first time, and it won’t be, but you can’t get to the levels you aspire to unless you are willing to take the risk and get started.

Trying to do everything can be exhausting

When writing a book, starting a business, or even learning a new skill, there are so many things that you can learn to do, or you can realize where you don’t have the skills and allow someone to help you. With this first book, I knew that I had a very small budget, but I also knew what I wanted to get done with this book. With that said, I knew that there were several things that I needed to learn how to do. Those included doing the actual writing, the editing, the audiobook recording and editing, the marketing, etc.

Even though there were all of these things that needed to be done, I still knew that things like the cover design, or even getting a photo for the back of the book were not things that I could do with my own skill set. I had two options: I could either take the time and energy to learn how to do these things myself, and have many hours used that I could use to do the other things with my book that I actually had some idea of how to do, or I could get help and allow someone else to do the things that I didn’t know how to do.

Luckily, my wife, Rachel is an excellent photographer, so I was able to get professional photos done for free. Neither of us are overly skilled with photoshop, so I knew that I needed to hire someone to design the book cover. Even though this cost me money, it was worth it as it allowed me to not exhaust my energies trying to learn yet another skill.

Sometimes when you are like me, and you don’t have a large budget to do a project, then you do have to put in the time and the energy to do most things by yourself. While this can work, and you can get exactly what you want out of the project, it takes time away from doing other things that you can do well. I am definitely a proponent of learning the basics of a skill for most things, but I have also had to learn that sometimes the better way of doing something is by not doing it and allowing someone else who has the skills to do it.

Sometimes you just have to set a deadline

Someday I’ll write that book.

Someday I’ll run that marathon.

Someday I’ll start my own business.

Life is full of somedays, and as long as we continue to say that we will do something someday we will never get it done.

I have been wanting to write a book for a while now, writing my first manuscript back in January of 2020. By the time January of 2022 came around, I looked around and saw that despite the fact that I wanted to become an author, and have my book out in the world for people to read, it had been a full two years since I started my first novel, and I had little to show for it. All I had were a couple of files on my computer with characters, plot points, and even a few written chapters, but nothing that I could say was a book.

Over the course of those two years I had continued to tell myself that someday I would do it, but that someday always seemed to be another month away, or I had to get through something at work and then I would start, but there was always an excuse of why I couldn’t start on the thing that I had said that I wanted to do.

Then things changed. I set a deadline. After doing some research, I found that it was possible to release a short, non-fiction book in just ninety days. Looking at the scale of my book, I knew that wouldn’t be possible, but I decided to think about how long I thought would be reasonable to accomplish this task. After thinking about it, I was able to come to the conclusion that I thought I would be able to write my book, edit it, and do everything necessary to self-publish it in six months.

With this in mind, I set a deadline on July 1st to release everything. This included the Kindle book as well as the audiobook. With a deadline set, I was able to go back through the six-month time frame and roughly block out how long I thought each step would take. I was then further able to set smaller deadlines such as the date when I needed to have the first draft done, the date when I needed to have the editing done, and the date that I needed to have the audiobook done.

Since I now had it broken down into smaller steps, I was able to see what I needed to get done every day if I wanted to meet this deadline that I had set for myself. Then to make sure that I didn’t give up on myself, I made it public by posting to my Facebook and Instagram that I was going to write a book, and that I was going to publish it on July 1st. Now I had a deadline, and accountability and with that it became much easier to carve out the necessary time each day to work on the project that I had said I wanted to.

Conclusion

I hope that you can see through all of this, some of the many things that I have learned during the process of writing a book. I encourage you to take the advice that has been given here and go forward and start the thing that you have been wanting to do but for some reason or another you keep putting it off.

With starting something it is okay that sometimes you don’t know what you are doing. There are many resources that you can use from books to videos to coaches that can be greatly beneficial to you learning what needs to happen for your project to take shape. Additionally, you should think about the time and the focus that it is going to take to see a big project to completion. It is one thing to say that you are going to do something an get started on it. It is another thing altogether to start the project and then see the project through to completion.

I also highly recommend that you do just get started. That you take the time to do something badly the first time, and then from there refine it and learn from it so that you can make it better the second time. Furthermore, I learned that it can be exhausting trying to do everything in a project, and I am telling you that you don’t necessarily have to. It is okay to give up some control and not do everything by yourself in an attempt to give yourself more time to work on the things that you are actually good at.

I will write it again here because I think that it does bear repeating. The will always be another someday unless you decide that today is that someday that you have always been searching for. Unless you decide that you want to get something started and you want to do it by a certain time, there will always be something else that comes up that gets in the way of you accomplishing your dreams. Set the deadline, and get started.

There are several more things that I have learned throughout the course of this project, but these are things that are universal, regardless of the type of project that you want to complete.

What about you? What are the things that you have learned while working on a project. Please let us know in the comments.