How Can I Stay Motivated to Finish My Book?

Your book is worth writing, you just need to trust yourself to finish it.

Article written by Anjanette “AJ” Harper .

You’re at a party, innocently spooning a seven-layer dip onto your plate, when the friend you’ve been trying to avoid all night taps you on the shoulder.

“How’s your book going?”

Ah, the question many authors dread hearing.

It’s not going at all, thank you very much. I haven’t touched it in months. I may never finish it. Thanks for asking.

“It’s going great,” you say. “Hey, did you hear the news about the…”

After you successfully redirect the conversation, you opt for the Irish goodbye and slip out the back door before anyone else asks you about your book.

The deadlines you set when you started writing have long gone, along with your enthusiasm for the project.

Other authors who started their books around the same time are lapping you.

And you’re starting to wonder if you should just toss your unfinished manuscript into a burn pile and be done with it.

The last thing you need to hear is someone’s not-so-helpful advice. “Didn’t so-and-so finish their book in 30 days with that fill-in-the-blank book thing? You should try that.”

The often-quoted statistics about how many people start but never complete their books are based on unreliable surveys and specific to genre, but they are all in the range of 80%-97%. In my nearly 20 years in publishing and more than 30 years working as a professional writer, I’d say those sad numbers are likely true.

Most first-time authors don’t finish their books.

Heck, plenty of established authors sometimes never finish their books. Fans of?Game of Thrones?have been waiting more than 13 years for George R. R. Martin to finish the sixth installment in the series, since he started writing it in 2010. He feels plenty bad about it, too. Real “dark night of the soul” stuff.

In 2020?Martin informed readers?who planned to attend the World Science Fiction Convention that year, “If I don’t have?The Winds of Winter?in hand when I arrive in New Zealand, you have here my formal written permission to imprison me in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid, until I’m done.”

As of this writing, he’s still not finished. In other words, newbie author or not, if you have been struggling with finishing your book, you’re in good company. And at least you know you can cross imprisoning yourself on an island next to a lake of sulfuric acid off your “strategies to finish my book” list.?

You’re stuck. Now what???

?? Finish reading the full article here.