Pearl of Writing Wisdom
If you don't schedule your sessions, you won’t write.
If you don’t write, you won’t build stamina.
If you don't build stamina, you can't write a book.
When I was writing my first book, I had to face some problematic issues like continuity and tension. I knew nothing about them. They hadn’t come into play when I was writing a story or an article. But penning an entire book with a theme, characters, and story arcs, one chapter flowing into the next and finally ending up somewhere that made sense, was brand new. I had no idea how to organize such a huge undertaking. Writing an article was a sprint but writing a book was a marathon. Did I have the stamina to get through it?
When I voiced my reservations to a journalist friend, she gave me some great advice. “At this point, don’t think about the book as a whole,” she said. “Think of each chapter as a separate story or you’ll end up in bed with the covers pulled up over your head.”
I knew that posture all too well and it sounded like she did, too.