158: Write Your Book in 2025

 

It's almost 2025, which means it's time to think about your resolutions for next year! If you want to write a book in 2025, learn how to do so in this episode. And don't forget to sign up for the How to Write Your Novel in 2025 workshop happening Friday, December 13 at 1pm EST HERE.

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write your book in 2025

HHi friend, welcome back to your big creative life Podcast. I'm really, really excited about this episode because, yes, we're going to talk about writing your book in 2025 setting goals, things that can hold you back, how to make sure it's a priority, all that good stuff. But also, I want to tell you that if you're listening to this podcastthe week that it's released, on Friday, December 13, I'm hosting a free training that is basically this times 100 like how to how to actually do this. A lot more tips, a lot more strategy, a lot more mindset coaching. We have an exercise that we're going to do. It's going to be, it's going to be so awesome.

 

So it's happening Friday, December 13, at 1pm Eastern Time. Now there is an option to pay if you want. I'm calling it like a donation based class. So if you want to donate something, if you're like, Hey, I've been getting a lot of value out of the podcast. Your content. I want to support you. Whatever you can pay what you want for the workshop. But if you don't want to pay anything, that is completely, completely fine. It's, again, it's, it's free, so just come hang out. We'll talk writing. If you cannot attend live, if that time doesn't work for you, still go ahead and sign up,because all send the replay out, and the replay will be available for a short time foryou to watch it after. So definitely still sign up, even if that time doesn't work for you, it's gonna be so fun.

 

I did a workshop like that a couple of years ago, but I did it as it was like a free workshop, and then I was pitching the membership that I had at the time. So this isgoing to be different from that, because I'm not pitching anything at the end. It's just purely value, like set goals, talk about writing your book, strategies, all that good stuff. And then again, if you if you want to pay something, you can, but no pressure if not. So I'm really excited about that. I think it'll be fun. So definitely go sign up if you haven't already. And if you're listening to this the week that it comes out, I decided to do it in December this year because I wanted to just take advantage of, like a lot of people, set new year's resolutions and goals and do intention setting before January 1. And so I didn't want to wait till January to do it.That's why I tweaked it this time around.

 

Okay, but I want to cover a few things in this episode, to give you a little bit of a taste of some things that we're going to talk about and how you can make sure that you set this this goal and make this a priority to write your book in 2025 one of the most powerful things that you can do as a new writer, or someone who has not written before but wants to write a book now, is to declare yourself a writer and to put this out into the universe that you are ready to write a book, that you are ready to become a writer. You are ready to stop putting this on the back burner, to make it a priority, and like, declare that doesn't have to be publicly, unless you want to. You can do that.

 

But just deciding and making this a priority, setting a goal to do this is massive, because there's an identity shift for a lot of us that happens when you go from not writing to becoming a writer. That is a big identity shift. It was for me. There were all of these years I had in my adult life where I thought of myself as a writer, but I wasn't writing, and it was like this, this thing that just I wanted to be a writer so badly, and so once I finally started writing, I had to adjust and be like, Okay, I'm a writer. Like, I'm actually doing this now. This is wild, and it felt really good, and it was really exciting, but yeah, there was that bit of a bit of that identity shift, and there's also, I see a lot of people say, like aspiring writer, which is fine if you want tocall yourself that, but just remember that if you write, you're a writer, full stop. End of story.

 

You don't have to achieve X number of book sales. You don't have to be published in this many or this these types of publications. You don't have to be a full time author to call yourself a writer like none of that. Those are all just external things that we've people confuse what it actually means to be a writer. So if you write, you're a writer. End of story, okay, I want to do a little example with you of goal setting and breaking this down to reverse engineer your goal, because it can feel kind of daunting if you've never written a book before. To be like, Okay, I want to write a book in 2025 but it feels really daunting. It feels really overwhelming to think about doing this, so I want to walk you through how to break this down so it feels a lot more manageable and less overwhelming if that's the spot that you're inand if not, awesome.

 

Okay, so when you think about setting writing related goals, you have to answer this honestly, because you are going to know which type of person you are. Some writers, it is very, very helpful to have a page count goal, or aword count goal ahead of time, so that they can reverse engineer it and break it down, to know that they're on track to know how many words they have to write per day, week, month, etc, to hit their goal. Some writers that does the opposite. It is not motivating. It is scary. It places more pressure and anxiety on you. So I'm going to do an example of breaking down word count. But if that's not helpful for you, if youwould rather just set a big goal of writing a book in 2025 that's okay. You don't have to do this.

 

So if you are writing adult fiction, it is going to depend a bit your word count on if you want to self publish this book that you are writing, or if you want to go down the road of trying for traditional publishing, where you get an agent, and then the agent sends the book out to publishers, and then you get a book deal, and they publish the book. If you are going down the route of querying and trying to find an agent, then word counts matter a lot more than they do for self publishing. Writer'sDigest has a really good like chart graph thingy that breaks down different word counts, and that's where, honestly, I base a lot of My word count recommendationson what I'm seeing from agents, from editors. It's not just my personal feeling that your book should be this long. I'm basing that off of what people in the traditional publishing world say, but standard for most adult novels is somewhere between 80 to 100,000 words under that. Slightly under that is fine.

 

If you're writing something that requires some world building, like fantasy, sci fi, etc, you can get up to 110 115 like those are generally okay. I've seen agents throughout different numbers for the top end of it, but so let's just say, for the sake of this example, that you want your book to be 85,000 words. That's the goal. That's what you're aiming for your final word count to be. If you break that down into six months, let's say that you want to take the first six months of 2025, to get your rough draft out. This is what that breaks down to 469.6 words a day. So roughly 470 we're gonna round up 470 words a day. It'll take you 181 days, six months I did. I'm recording this on November 19. So I did six months from November 19, which would be May 19.

 

But obviously, if you because some months are longer, some months are shorter, it'll vary slightly. And then, if you want to go by week, if you're someone who run, wants to write every single day, awesome. But you know what you need to hit every single day? It's 470 words. But you can also do that per week. So per week, if you're taking six months to write your rough draft, and there's 181 days, it's going tobe 3292 No, 3290 words per week. So that's not too bad, right? Like just over 3000 words per week. The standard obviously depends a lot on what size font you use, if you're doing double say spaced or single spaced, the font all that stuff. But generally, a manuscript like a page on a Word document is around 250 words.

 

So just to give you some idea of how long that would be in pages, but it varies wildly. Some pages are a lot longer than that. Some are shorter. It just depends on spacing, word choice, font, all that good stuff. So 3290 words per week. Okay, that's doable, right? It's a lot more manageable to think about doing that than like,oh, I have to write a book next year, and I don't know how I'm gonna do it. If you can keep yourself on track with those weekly goals, or even monthly goals, if that's better for you. If you're someone who wants to try doing a couple of really long writing sessions every single week and you might only write twice a week, then maybe doing a monthly word count goal is a better option for you. But the point what I want to illustrate with this exercise is that you can keep yourself on track that way and break it down so it feels more manageable just breaking it into into chunks.

 

Okay, the next thing that I want to do in this episode is to share one of the go through one of the slides that I have from the training, which is kind of. Make common mistakes that new writers make, that there are things these things are they can prevent you from making progress on your book, or they can just make the process a lot more difficult than it needs to be. Number one is waiting for motivation. I've talked a lot on the podcast about this before, but there's this, this idea that some people have about, about creativity, about writing, that there's this muse who comes down, and we get bestowed these ideas, and you have to wait until you're feeling it and in the flow state, and before you can sit down and write, and if you try to force it, that's a bad idea, because you're not going to do your best work and whatever.

 

And what I always say is like, if you don't care how long it takes you to write your book, if you have it doesn't matter you're just writing a book for personal fulfillment, then, yeah, you can only write when you feel inspired and you want to, and that's great. But for the rest of us, it's not always possible to wait until we havemotivation to sit down and write, because motivation ebbs and flows. It's not something that's consistent. It's not it's not a thing we have consistent access to. And also it's backwards. Like, to get into the flow state, you have to just kind of push yourself to do it, then once you start doing it, then you get into that flow state, but to kind of artificially force yourself to get into it before you even begin. That's backwards. And if you if you've gone to the gym, if you started working out when you weren't working out previously, it's the same thing.

 

You can't wait for motivation to want to go to the gym, because there are a lot of days where you're not going to want to do it. But you do it because it's a habit. Youdo it because it's something that's important to you. You do it because you like the end result, whatever. Same thing is true with writing. Some days you're just going to have to sit down and write and to meet that word count goal. If you're doing that on days when you don't want to, and that's okay, and on those days, maybe you just write for 10 minutes. Maybe you don't even hold yourself to a word count goal. On those days, you just write for 10 minutes and get out as much as you possibly can, write as quickly as you can in those 10 minutes, and that's it. The nextthing that can sidetrack writers, or that can be a mistake, is being so focused on originality, like that is the priority.

 

That is the most important thing, is making sure that their book is 100% original, and it's never seen, been seen before. So that could sound like a good thing, right? Like, of course you want your book to be original. Of course you don't want it to bea copy of something that's already out there. But there's almost nothing. There arealmost no new ideas. Almost no new ideas when it comes to books, if you think about genres that you read in that have tropes which are just ideas that we see over and over again. I mean, yeah, that there are. There are no, almost no new ideas out there anymore. So instead of focusing on something, a story idea that has literally never been told before, focus on making your book the best book it can be because the fact that it's you writing it, your characters that you have brainstormed and developed, your world, your conflict, your lived experience as a person, is also going to infuse that book with with some originality.

 

Just because it's you writing it, you're an original person. You have, you a unique writing voice that no one else has. So even if there are some common themes or tropes or it's not nothing, it's nothing earth shattering in terms of its originality, that's okay. So don't place too much weight on that. Next up is a perfectionist mindset. Perfectionist mindset is, if you're a perfectionist, it doesn't mean that you like to be perfect or to have things be perfect. The true definition that I like of perfectionism is that you feel guilt and shame for not being perfect. This can cripple a lot of new writers, because you are confronting your inner critic for the first time. You are realizing that you are you're judging your creative work.

 

And if this, if this is the first creative thing that you've done, like since you were a kid, that can be really hard. It can feel scary. And so the biggest thing I would say for you, if you, if that sounds familiar, like you really judge yourself for what you're writing, or if you haven't even started writing yet, but you just know you have a suspicion that you are going to be judging your own writing and be afraid that it's not good enough. I want you to give yourself permission to let your first draft be extremely messy. Your first draft is for you. No one else is going to be seeing that first draft. There are so many different ways to write a book, so I'm not going to say that this is the correct way. And if you're doing it differently than this, and then you're doing it wrong, definitely not.

 

But if asked, the way that I would recommend new writers approach writing the book, writing your book, is to focus on getting the. First Draft app quickly to not go back and edit as you go, just focus on getting that rough draft out as quickly as you can. And then you can go back and shape it. You can add more. You can change things, whatever you end up having to do. That's all fine, so just let it be messy, and don't go back to read what you've written before. That helps with that perfectionist mindset. The last thing I think I'll mention here is shiny object syndrome, which is where.

 

Okay, so let's say it's early 2025 you've decided on your book idea. You're like, This is it? I'm so excited. I've committed. You start writing everything's wonderful, and then you hit a stumbling block. Maybe it's chapter two,maybe it's page two. Maybeit's one of your characters that you don't know what to do with. Maybe it's some kind of plot thing that you don't know how to resolve. Whatever it is. There's going to be something that feels hard in the beginning, or not even necessarily in the beginning, at any point in the process. And then you are going to get an idea for a new book that looks really, really exciting, and you are going to be tempted to jump ship and jump over onto that ship of that new idea, because it's exciting, it's unexplored. There are no problems yet with that new book idea.

 

So it can be really tempting to pursue that thing. Now I want to be clear that it's not a problem to have a new book idea and to explore it a little bit like definitely. You can make notes, you can even do some brainstorming for it, fine. But where shiny object syndrome can get people in trouble is they're constantly jumping ship to a new manuscript idea without ever finishing anything. Some writers have the ability to work on multiple projects at once. So if that's you, maybe you can work on two book ideas simultaneously, like one day you're feeling this book, so you work on that one. One day you're feeling this book, so you work on that one. That'sfine.

 

Again, the danger of shiny object syndrome is just that you will continually get a few chapters, a few 1000 words, maybe 10,000 words in, and then you decide, oh no, this isn't working. I need to pick something else. And then you pick something else, and the same thing happens. And this happens over and over and over again.So new ideas can be wonderful. They're shiny, they're magical. We definitely want to take note of those things. So you can jot this down in a journal. You can put it onyour phone if you get an idea for something else. But as much as possible, try to give yourself a time limit of committing just to this first book idea. If you give yourself two months and you hate every minute of it, and you still want to jump ship and do the other book idea at the end of two months, fine, maybe that's a sign, but you have to just force yourself to either stick with one book idea, if that's the kind of writer you are, or if you have two book ideas, maybe just work on those instead of constantly jumping ship.

 

So that's something that can derail people as well. Okay, so I hope this was helpful, just a few little tips and reframes and things with goal setting and and things to watch out for as you're thinking about writing your book in 2025 again, we're going to have a lot more tips and tricks in the workshop, and there's going to be an opportunity for you to do some goal setting and some intention setting for 2025 so if you're someone who just wants to like clear 2024 and start fresh in 2025 in your writing life, even if you've already written a book before, that's fine, like just come sign up for the workshop again. It doesn't matter if you can't make that time. I'll send out the replay.

 

So yeah, I'd love to see you there if it works, and if it's something you're interested in, whatever the case, whatever your goal related to writing for 2025 I'm putting good energy out there for all of us for that we have a really, really good 2025 in terms of our writing life and outside our writing life as well. But yeah, I'm gonna do an episode at the end, like in a couple weeks, that's coming out. It's talking about reflections from this year for me, because there were some things that didn't go according to plan this year with my writing life. Isn't that always the case? So we'll talk more about that, and like lessons learned and stuff. But anyways, please sign up for the workshop if you would like, and hope to see you there. And I hope this was helpful. Thank you so much for listening.

Katie Wolf