Advice offered to a beginning writer, who’d asked for “words of wisdom” as they work through the writing phase on their book and are trying to keep up momentum…

*******************

The best advice I can offer is to JUST WRITE. 🙂 Don’t edit as you go, that will only slow you down. If you find yourself stalled on one section, feel free to jump ahead (or back) to a scene that engages you more. But keep pumping out those words: even if they’re crap, you can always edit them into something better later, and you can’t edit what you don’t got.

If you come across a place where you have to put content but you don’t know exactly what that content is yet (town name, chemical compound, how to train a hawk, etc), put something like “TWK” in its place. Something that you won’t write in the regular course of the novel, so that when the time comes to fill in those blanks, you can just do a global search for “TWK” and find all the places where you need to fill in missing details.

I found that doing a rough outline in advance was immensely helpful, as well as using the writing program Scrivener, which allows you to keep all your chapters/notes in one master screen and drag them/rearrange them as you need to (Scrivener has a 30 day trial, so you can try it free before you buy it, and it’s actually quite affordable).

If you have further questions, feel free to ask. 🙂