The first thing you have to do to self-publish your novel is to write.

It pains me to say it, but it is the only way to make a rough draft! And if you’re anything like me, you started your book with the best of intentions, full of caffeine, hopes, and dreams. You wrote like crazy for the first portion of your novel.

But then things slowed down. You found yourself off doing other things with your spare time. You found reasons not to work on your book. You told yourself that you had no time due to all the responsibilities on your plate.

Sound familiar?

This is where most people find they are lacking inspiration and motivation. The idea simply ceased producing serotonin, and so your novel came to a screeching halt. But that’s ok, motivation and inspiration will start back up again soon, right?

Well, not exactly.

Inspiration is a Fickle Thing

Inspiration by itself isn’t enough to get you pounding out that word count. Though it certainly helps. My inspiration tends to come at the most inopportune times. It seems like my best and most cohesive ideas come to me when I am about to fall asleep, or maybe in a dream. Either way, my subconscious does some heavy lifting when it comes to my plots and characters. I know that if I were to wait for inspiration to be the thing that gets me to write, I don’t think I would ever get a decent night’s sleep.

This is true for inspiration no matter when it comes because it’s usually not so well timed that you can just download it into your brain when you’re ready to write. I wish that were the case! Inspiration can find you anywhere (this much I have found to be very true) but there are few times when that inspiration strikes at just the right time.

Motivation is Great, When Its Here

Motivation is also not enough to get your project done. You can wish to become a novelist all you want, but wishing and executing are two different things. I graduated with my master’s in creative writing in 2018. At the time I was excited about what was to come and couldn’t wait to write the remainder of my book.

The first 35,000 words of my current novel served as my thesis for the program. It was wonderful– there were regular deadlines, I received grades and feedback from my classmates… and because of that, I got an incredible amount of work done in just ten weeks. It was an amazing system for me to really pump out the word count. I was able to shape my chapters and make edits based on the feedback I was given.

When I graduated it was both a blessing and a curse because I had the shiny degree, but then I lost my writing process. Don’t get me wrong, I worked on my novel here and there when motivation struck (spoiler alert, it wasn’t as often as I would have liked), but I would go months without working on it. I would come back to my rough draft and instead of moving forward with new material, I would get stuck in an ongoing loop of editing, rewriting, and editing some more.

The truth is that those two things, motivation and inspiration, aren’t enough. You might be able to get along with using just those two, but if you’re looking to make consistent progress on your book and any goals, you also need dedication.

Plot Twist: Dedication

At the risk of sounding cheesy, you need all three things working in tandem to propel yourself forward. I will use myself as an example so you can see what I mean.

As I already mentioned there was a lot of stop-and-go after I graduated from my masters program. I would go through pockets where my mental health wasn’t good, so I definitely had no motivation, and my well of inspiration went dry. I would go through times when I just felt like it was a hobby and that it wasn’t something I needed to do. I could make do without it.

A little over two years ago I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a neuromuscular pain disorder (though the definition of the illness seems to keep changing, so, we’ll see) where someone feels pain in instances they normally wouldn’t. They also may feel exaggerated amounts of pain to certain stimuli. I say all this to say there were (and still are) some days when I just focused on life, hour by hour.

These things combined led to my book still not being finished, and still not being published in 2023. One day I woke up thinking about how it had been my dream ever since I was in middle school to get a book of mine published. I turned to self-publishing because I wanted to make good on that dream as it was in my power to do so. I told myself that even if I never did anything else with my writing, I would get this one book published so that I could say I had.

Putting it All Together

I started doing some things differently now that I had the third and final ingredient: dedication. In many ways, dedication to me was about learning to lasso motivation and inspiration and then keeping them on a short leash.

The first and potentially most important thing I did was that I set a self-imposed deadline. I decided that I was going to publish my novel on my birthday, as a gift to myself. From there I figured out how much time I had to get things done.

I mentioned that inspiration can strike at any moment, and I took this to heart. I started stashing notebooks throughout my apartment and even kept some in my purse and work bag. And if I somehow was nowhere near any of them, I would jot down notes on my phone. Anything to make sure that my ideas, even if they didn’t seem like much at the time, wouldn’t go to waste and weren’t forgotten. Whenever I was doing menial tasks I found my mind would wander; oftentimes to something that I could use in my story.

Another thing I started doing was to impose a daily, weekly, and monthly word count requirement. (I had no one to report to with this, but I found if I thought of it more as a “requirement” I was more likely to get it done.) I looked at my current word count and figured out how many words I would have to write each day to get it done. You would want to include time to edit, rewrite, and get formatting done, but I will cover this timetable in another post. I think the word count at first was something like 330 words a day.

In the grand scheme of things, that isn’t a lot of words. Mind you at this stage I was just writing anything I could think of that was relevant, because I knew if I kept editing myself I would get nowhere. Some days it felt like nothing, some days it felt like more of a chore.

But here is the kicker: taking the time out of my schedule and sitting down in front of my novel each day allowed me to make steady progress. Some days I army-crawled through my imagination trying to put anything down on paper. But many times I found that once I started showing up regularly, I blew past 330 words like nothing.

I started writing over a thousand words in a sitting because thanks to my phone and my notebooks, I was fueled with potential ideas, and thanks to my self-imposed deadlines, I had a mission once again. I found that I had the dedication I had been missing for the past couple of years. People’s systems will vary and it could take a little time to find the one that works for you, but it will be so worth it to anyone that has this dream.

The truth is, if you’re waiting on inspiration and/or motivation alone to work on your novel, there’s a good chance it won’t get done. Or it could take you much longer than my five years.