Overcoming Overwhelm to Write a Book — and Finish It! - Lisa Tener

As I’ve been meeting with students in my Bring Your Book to Life ®Program, several have had moments of overwhelm: “I can’t believe I signed up to write a book. There’s no way I can do it in the middle of this stressful time.”

And I get it. But I also get how writing and publishing a book is a dream that most of them have lived with for many years. Maybe that’s true for you as well.

I wouldn’t be much of a coach if I let them-or you-off the hook!

At the same time, I don’t want to add to anyone’s stress. And it’s not easy or fun to write a book from a state of stress and overwhelm. Not even very productive. So how can we change the vibe and make this fun, empowering and successful?

Here’s some of the advice I’ve been giving my book writing participants in our private calls:

1. Revise your goal: Okay, so you realized you can’t write a whole first draft in 8 weeks. What is realistic? Set a goal that feels do-able or you’ll be in inner conflict before you even start. Writing three quarters, or even half, of a first draft is an excellent start. Does that work?
2. Try different times: Several people found that the time they scheduled to write didn’t work for them. Early morning writing sessions got bumped by work meetings in one case. Rethink your timing. Can you write during lunch hour? On the weekend? Just be sure to schedule those times and keep them sacred whenever possible.
3. Connection with your mission: One writer had several important reasons for writing her book and one of those was to capture her mother’s stories while she still has that opportunity. When work got too busy and overhelming she worried that she couldn’t write a book, so we “rethunk” priorities. What if she made interviewing her mom the priority? She could capture the interviews on audio and have them transcribed. Then if she didn’t have time for much writing, she’d still have the legacy of the recordings to use whenever she could make additional time for the book. And the opportunity to get her mom’s stories recorded for posterity and a possible book would not be lost.
4. Try the litmus test: Here’s the question I have everyone in class ask themselves whenever they are tempted to do something else instead of writing time or whenever a new opportunity comes up that they’re tempted to say yes to:

If I say “yes” to this, what does that mean for my book?

If the invitation conflicts with writing time, perhaps you can immediately reschedule the writing time. Or not-recommit to writing! Or perhaps you want to make the next few months a bit of a writing retreat and be more of a hermit. Good answers are, “Let me think about this and get back to you,” or “I’m working on a big project; can we look at this possiblity again in two or three months?”

It’s easy to get in the frame of mind that writing your book has to take away from other activites. But what if it doesn’t?

What challenges are coming up for you? What can you do to overcome them?

Originally published at https://www.lisatener.com on April 14, 2021.