Overcoming Challenges When Writing a Book: What Actually Works

I’ve published 113+ books under my own name. I’ve also completed 54+ ghostwriting projects. I write 10,000 to 12,000 words a day. I also have ADHD. That means my brain fights me on consistency, focus, and sustained effort every single morning. See how I stay motivated to write.

Every book I’ve finished was finished despite challenges. After decades of doing this professionally, I’ve found that the writers who finish books have systems, and talent, motivation or inspiration has little to do with it. You need a process that works with your brain and your life, and you need to show up and use it even on the days when writing feels impossible.

Why is starting a book so hard?

Most people who say they want to write a book never start, because the gap between “I have a book in me” and “I have a finished manuscript” feels impossibly large.

Eighty thousand words is an abstraction. It doesn’t feel like something a human being can produce. It is.

You produce it the same way you produce anything large: in pieces, on a schedule, over time. If you write 1,000 words a day, you have a first draft in three months. If you write 500 words a day, you have one in six months. (See also Sarah Domet’s 90 Days to Your Novel) The arithmetic isn’t complicated. The discipline is.

Every ghostwriting project I take on starts with an outline built from the client interviews.

My own novels start with a first chapter, then the outline, and then I write whichever chapters grab me and connect them together. Either way, the outline is a loose skeleton that tells me where I’m going, and it changes whenever the story teaches me something. An outline turns “write a book” into “write this chapter,” and writing this chapter is something you can do in a sitting.

Is Writer’s Block a Systems Problem?

Writer’s block is what happens when you sit down to write without knowing what you’re writing next. If you open a blank document with no plan and no direction, your brain has to figure out what to say and how to say it at the same time. That’s two jobs at once, and for most people it produces paralysis. The fix is separation. Figure out what to say in one session. Figure out how to say it in another.

When I outline a chapter, I decide what happens, what information the reader needs, and what the emotional trajectory is. When I sit down to write that chapter, those decisions are already made. I’m executing. The blank page isn’t blank because I already know what goes on it.

For my ADHD brain, the 45-minute block is the unit of work. That’s how long my focus cooperates before it starts looking for something more interesting. I write in 45-minute blocks with mandatory 15-minute breaks. During those 45 minutes, I write. During the break, I do something completely different. Then I come back for another block. Eight or nine blocks in a day produces 10,000 to 12,000 words.

If 45 minutes doesn’t work for your brain, find the interval that does. Some people work best in 25-minute sprints. Some can sustain 90 minutes. The number doesn’t matter. What matters is knowing your limit and building your system around it instead of pretending you can write for four unbroken hours when you can’t.

The Consistency Problem

Writing a book requires sustained effort over months. Motivation doesn’t sustain effort over months. Systems do.

Set a daily word count target. Not a vague intention to “write some today” but a specific number you commit to hitting. My target is high because this is my full-time profession. Yours might be 500 words, or 1,000, or 300. The number matters less than the consistency.

Three hundred words a day, every day, for a year is 109,500 words. That’s a long novel written in daily increments so small they barely register as effort. I think this is the math most would-be authors never do, and it’s a shame, because the ones who quit usually quit believing they needed hours they never had.

Track your output. I keep records of daily word counts because my ADHD brain responds to concrete measurable goals. Seeing the numbers accumulate provides motivation that abstract “you should write today” never will. A spreadsheet showing 47 consecutive days of hitting your target is harder to break than a streak you’re not tracking.

Anthony Trollope wrote his novels while working for Britain’s General Post Office. In his autobiography he says he was at his desk every morning at 5:30 with his watch in front of him, and he required of himself 250 words every quarter of an hour. Three hours a day, he figured, was as much as a man ought to write, and it gave him more than ten pages a day.

He also kept a diary for every book, divided into weeks, and logged the pages as he went. A week with too few pages, he wrote, was “a blister to my eye.” The Christian Science Monitor credits him with more than 60 books, most of them written in the hours before breakfast.

I think Trollope would’ve understood the spreadsheet. He had a target and a diary, and the diary kept him honest on the mornings when a day job handed him every excuse to skip.

Write at the same time every day if you can. Routine takes the decision out of starting. My day splits into three parts: client work in the morning, my own books in the afternoon, and client work again in the evening. Sometimes they get shuffled around, but each part of the day has a job and I don’t have to argue with myself about it. I think writers who wait until they feel like writing are handing the decision to the worst possible judge.

How do you handle self-doubt while writing a book?

From the podcast

Matt Biggar burned out on a YouTube channel and pivoted repeatedly before finding what the work was for, on Leaders and Their Stories: What I realized through all of these pivots and changes is that what I needed to become was the version of myself that I needed when I first started my business. Self-doubt survives on the gap between who you are and who you think should be writing this. The gap closes by writing, not by waiting.

I’ve published 113+ books and the imposter voice still shows up every morning. It doesn’t go away with experience. You just learn to work alongside it.

Self-doubt becomes a real problem when it stops you from producing pages. Don’t try to eliminate the doubt. Make producing pages a mechanical process that happens regardless of how you feel about the work.

When I coach fiction writers, the ones who struggle most with self-doubt are the ones who evaluate their writing while they’re producing it. They write a paragraph, reread it, decide it’s terrible, delete it, and start over. Three hours later they’ve produced nothing and feel worse than when they started. First drafts are supposed to be bad. Every first draft I’ve ever written was rough. The quality emerges in revision.

Give yourself permission to write badly. Hit your word count. Fix it later. A bad page can be edited. A blank page can’t.

The Revision Problem

First-time authors often treat revision as punishment for not getting it right the first time. Revision is where the book gets written. The first draft gets the story down. Revision makes it good.

I revise in passes, each focused on a different element. (See also my review of Revision and Self-Editing) One pass for structure and pacing. One pass for character consistency. One pass for dialogue. One pass for line-level prose quality.

Trying to fix everything at the same time is overwhelming and ineffective. Focused passes catch problems that scattered revision misses. I get frustrated with the idea that a good writer gets it right the first time. That myth convinces new authors their rough draft proves they can’t write, and plenty of them quit right there, a few passes away from a decent book. (See four questions to ask before you quit a book)

Distance helps. After finishing a draft, step away from it for at least a week before revising. Your brain needs time to forget what you intended to write so it can see what you wrote. The gap between those two things is where revision lives.

What do authors find most challenging about writing a book?

Someone asked a writers’ group that question, and the answers split almost down the middle. Half were about the writing. One writer couldn’t figure out which genre his book fit into, and another struggled to make her world building flow. Others named imposter syndrome, procrastination, trusting themselves and finishing. One answered with two words, “Chapter 7,” and every novelist in the group knew what he meant. A university lecturer with five books said work stress left her too drained to write the sixth.

The other half had nothing to do with writing. They were about getting people to read the book and buy it, marketing without an agent, waiting on queries, fighting off scammers and putting up with toxic people in writing groups.

One author summed it up. Everything else is easy, she said, compared to getting people to read your books.

The sections above deal with the first half, since you can’t market a book you haven’t finished. Plan for the second half before you get there. The writers who struggle most after publication are the ones who thought the last page was the finish line.

When Should You Get Help Writing Your Book?

Some challenges are better solved with a professional than with willpower. If you have the story but can’t find the structure, book coaching gives you a collaborator who has done this enough times to see problems you can’t see from inside the manuscript. You can find current writing coaching pricing on the writing coaching page. Sometimes three sessions solve the structural problem that’s been stopping you for months.

When you have the story but don’t want to write it yourself, ghostwriting is the other path. You can find current ghostwriting pricing on the ghostwriting page. You provide the vision and the voice. I handle the craft.

To develop your writing skills independently, my handbooks at The Writing King cover every aspect of fiction craft from character development to world-building to dialogue to point of view, with AI-assisted techniques for working through each one. My Awful Writing Handbook addresses the common problems that stop manuscripts from working and shows you how to fix them.

The challenges of writing a book are real. They’re also solvable. Not with inspiration or motivation or metaphors about dragons and diamonds. With systems that account for how your brain works, applied consistently over time. That’s how books get finished. Start with a conversation if you want help getting yours done.

Writing Challenges FAQ