Satisfying as it is, even thrilling sometimes, writing a book can be tough work, work you may find overwhelming or work you don’t want to do, at least not “right now”. Like dieting to lose weight, if you don’t put your book first, you’ll always have a good reason to do something else.

Routines
I’ll help you develop a work pattern that’s comfortable for you but one that puts rigor and momentum into the project. Writers sometimes develop wildly idiosyncratic ways of working, but there are some things that are pretty obviously good ideas for almost everyone: Work in an isolated place that is entirely your own and completely dedicated to writing. Have your “stuff” handy so you can get into the swing of things easily and quickly. Your setup doesn’t have to be elaborate. Winston Churchill wrote standing at a small desk in his bedroom.

Most productive writers design a fairly strict routine and then “imprison” themselves in it. A friend of mine completed a long and pretty technical social science monograph while working at a demanding full-time job. He came home from work every evening, had a light snack, and went to work. Every night he worked until he had either drafted four pages or spent four hours massaging research data, never less and usually not more. If the writing went well and he met his “quota”, he sometimes quit work early. This rigid scheme and its built-in incentive for efficiency gave him powerful motives to get to work, and it made him a disciplined and much better writer. He never worked on the weekends. He says the routine unburdened him from a whole lot of decisions about self-management and it also let him enjoy his recreational time without worrying about neglecting his writing project. Nine months later he had a substantial and satisfying book. This kind of mechanical approach may work for you.  If not, we’ll find another one.

How I’ll help you sustain momentum
We’ll work on getting you a satisfying and realistic schedule for moving the project forward.  I’ve found it best to set one or two week deadlines.  Of course, I don’t set the deadlines, you do.  We’ll talk and come up with a realistic next task—could be a few pages, a revised outline, or a book you think you need to read before you go forward.  We’ll make sure you don’t try to do too much or too little before our next talk.  Then, we’ll check in and see how things went. We’ll proceed in this way, little by little, shoulder to shoulder, making any adjustments you need in the way you work and in your pace.

Don’t be in a hurry
The greatest enemy of the book-writer is impatience.  The greatest ally is scheduling. Books don’t write themselves, and they don’t usually get written fast.  If the author is like most of my clients, a busy professional, only some hours each week can be devoted to the task.  Accordingly, you’ll do well to think of the enterprise as years long.  If you want to be a marathon runner and haven’t done much more than jog around the block before, you’ll need many months, if not years, before you can achieve a creditable performance running 26 plus miles at one stretch. On the other hand, you can do it, if you are patient and work steadily.

Many busy writers hope to do their books in short bursts:  “I can’t do anything this next month, but I’m taking off ten days in May, and realistically I should be able to spend seven days of that on the book. So if I work, say, ten hours each day, I should get a lot done.”  Perhaps; but generally, the burst approach doesn’t work well and leads to frustration: “I couldn’t get down to work, really—the kids, my husband, patients kept finding me on my cell phone, and I got so irritated that, well, I needed some time off.  I suppose I worked 2 hours on average for four days. Not much.”  A better plan would have been to try for 3 hours each day for ten days and settle for two at a minimum.  It would have involved carving out time in advance—not whole days, say just between six and eight a.m.  Time would have been left for the rest of life and the inevitable obligations and distractions busy people experience.  Setting realistic schedules and keeping to them—not 100 percent, say 80 or 75—makes joggers into marathoners.

Don’t worry about your book being stolen
One reason some authors feel hurried is that they believe someone else will take their ideas and write the book first.  It’s possible.  But I have never known it to happen.  Book-writing is such a major undertaking that it is very unlikely anyone else will steal the idea, because they know ideas are cheap, but books are hard to write. Not only do they consume vast quantities of time and effort, as we have seen, they demand invention, research, more research, imagination, dialoguing, and refining of every kind.  If someone hasn’t had the idea for the book, it’s unlikely he or she will risk writing your idea at book length.  Moreover, two people don’t write the same book.  I recall that when I was working for a publisher I acquired one of the first big business books—26 weeks on the NY Times Bestseller List—and the month it first appeared another book, also about what American business could learn from Japanese management, came out by another publisher. The two books were sufficiently different that most people who bought one bought the other as well, driving up the sales of both. 

If, in fact, someone else beats you to the public with your particular subject—unless it’s something so topical as a presidential assassination or scandal—chances are that you will succeed in the marketplace are the same as if no other book had been published.  After all, you’ll say different things about the topic and in different ways.  In any case, trying to rush your own book into print—if you are inexperienced and have a job and a life—is almost certainly bound to fail.  So relax, make your long-range schedule, and settle into training for your marathon.