Staying motivated to write, edit, and finish your novel can be a major challenge for aspiring writers. In this video I provide my top ten tips for staying motivated to write your novel.

Ten Tips for Staying Motivated

1. Represent Your Novel – Use a photograph, song, or quote that represents the core of your novel. When you look at it, it will inspire you to keep working.

2. Identify Why You Want to Write – What motivated you to write your novel? Writing a sentence that outlines your motivation in writing the story can help to keep you on track.

3. Focus on Time Rather than Output – Tracking time rather than tracking the word count of your novel helps to keep you motivated because rather than stuffing the story with words to make goal, you will work on any component (even brainstorming) during your set time period.

4. Track Your Time – Tracking the amount of time you spend on your novel will help to keep you motivated because you won’t want to fall under your time limit or skip days of writing.

5. Find Someone to Hold You Accountable – Reporting your progress to a friend, spouse, or writing group will help to keep you motivated. Nobody likes to admit they skipped writing!

6. Don’t Stop for Writer’s Block – If you get writer’s block, power through it by working on something else related to your novel, like editing, brainstorming, or even choosing pictures for inspiration. Anything to keep you thinking about your novel is a good thing.

7. Love Your Story – If you don’t love the story you’re writing, you will never stay motivated to finish it. Make sure you really love what you’re doing and aren’t just hoping to be commercially successful with a story that doesn’t mean anything to you.

8.Remember Editing – Some writers forget about the importance of editing and get discouraged when their writing doesn’t look perfect the first time. A sloppy first draft is totally normal. Don’t panic!

9. Learn the Basics – Learning the basics of story structure, scene structure, and characterization can help to keep you motivated because you will be able to identify the problems and how to fix them so you will feel more capable of completing the novel.

10. Discover Your Pre-writing Process – If plotting your novel kills the fun and causes you to lose motivation, don’t do it. If you lose motivation because you don’t know what should happen next, then maybe outlining is for you. Finding a pre-writing process that works for you can be crucial to staying motivated.

What are your tips and tricks for staying motivated? 

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