Writing a book is a long and laborious, yet fulfilling undertaking. But before you continue reading any further I must confess that I have yet to complete my first book. I am, however, doing well on my current book, so I’d like to share some ideas from my own experience so far—on how to not run out of steam.
I can imagine that stamina is one of the worst obstacles of newbie writers. The word count for novels starts at roughly 75,000 words, but even a smaller manual or report of 15,000 words or less can be a daunting task for fledglings. If you’re used to writing long emails or blog posts of about 500 words each, getting over the hurdle to book writing can be exciting at first, but also poses the danger of getting overwhelmed in the long run. Even blog posts can be sometimes hard to finish. And while a high word count doesn’t guarantee good content, a story of 15,000 words will definitely not be be seen as a novel. Reaching a comfortable length can take many months, depending on consistency and effort. But unless you are already a professional wordsmith, you should consider developing a few habits that will tremendously help your writing.
I mentioned in my post on self-motivation techniques that doing less in the beginning is a good rule for staying motivated. I’ve found that this simple maxim is particularly effective when we want to be consistent at studying.
This tip is useful for self-learners specifically, because we are not studying within the confines of an institution, and are therefore not obligated to satisfy certain criteria within a set timelimit. But if you are confident to apply this approach in your scholastic pursuits, you are more than welcome to do so, and I would be happy to hear about it too.
If you have a burning desire to learn something new, a good way to keep the motivation aflame is simply to study less in the beginning. The thing with initial motivation is that it hasn’t transformed into passion yet. The signs I’ve collected from personal experience show that we just tend to madly fall in love with a fresh hobby or activity. Everything is so new that we are easily able to sustain motivation. There are so many things to explore in the beginning. But as we gain more knowledge and experience on the topic, we tend to lose much of the initial excitement. It’s natural. And it can’t be helped… But there is a way to convert the initial excitement into longer-lasting motivation.
Most of us get tempted to learn things fast when there’s a possibility to do so. Humans are impatient by nature, and we want to see progress and achievement as fast as possible. And the more information we consume the greedier we become. But this hinders us from internalizing knowledge, because we never get to properly digest the intake of information.
Fast learning causes congestion in hour heads, and we fail to retain information as we continue to process more and more data. Just look at most school exams. How much of the stuff are we able to keep in our heads in the long run? 40%? 30%? Or less? If this is the way we learn, it will be hard for us to become experts at anything. We need to focus more, and strive to pile new information on top of previously learned knowledge without losing grasp of it.
This post is about creating a plan for our learning endeavors. A learning plan provides us with a visual presentation of the task we are tackling. In order to stay committed to learning a skill, we should devise a structured plan that will lead us through the steps necessary to achieve our goal.
Self-Learner is a blog about self-education and self-improvement based lifestyle design. Goal? To become the best "version" of yourself, and feel excited to jump out of your bed every morning.