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While I own many books on writing, I've come short of learning to write with excellence, not having practiced most of the skills that are taught in them, and having seldom endured through the writing process. These things are due to my poor self-discipline, which is a serious problem for me, and which long has prevented me not only from writing but also from doing computer programming. People have told me that exercise should help. And some days ago, I tried this a little for a few non-consecutive days. What kind of exercise should I do, and how much should I do, to develop the self-discipline to persevere through my writing challenges? And what other things can you recommend that would help?

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You have probably heard this, then, but it is very true.

Set Manageable Goals.

I commit to work on only one chapter at a time, then move to the next. I keep a whiteboard with my work on the wall in my office and as I hit each goal, I mark it off, and I always put realistic and manageable goals on it.

If I hit that mark and think I can keep going, then I do, but I have to hit that one mark at least.

This does three things.

  1. It keeps you moving forward and helps prevent getting stuck.
  2. It prevents you from getting discouraged. You see progress, and you accomplished your goal. And if you do go further, you are ahead of your game.
  3. It keeps you from stressing. You see your goal, know what it is, and it's easy to reach.
CABlanche
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I started off like this too. We all honestly do, and what I did before I turned myself into a novelist: I would sit down daily and write, regardless of output and then take a break and force myself to tell myself stories. This is how you learn to be a storyteller too by the way, then I'd take breaks, but I started at the bottom and worked my way up through learning writing over the Internet, even though I'd been writing my whole life, but never professionally learned the skills.

This will take a while, so be patient, but sit down every day and develop a writing routine, and don't be hard on yourself, and you're going to be bad for a long time. I'm just getting to the point where I can write well and I've been doing it professionally for a while now, so take your time.

What you also need to do is build your vocabulary, even if you have a good one, because most of the words we use come straight out of instant recall from our memories as we write, so get a decent one and build upon that, but don't use big words. Smaller words are better and then have fun and learn writing over the Internet by reading stuff online, like news sites and stuff that is written really well. You also need to teach yourself how your style works, because not all writers write in the same style, so that's on you.

Keep your writing in possessive. This is important to learn as early on as possible. Dialog can be passive, but that's about it, and I'd argue even dialog needs to be in possessive and not broken up, but most novelists are lazy and break everything up, because they're genre writers.

I look down on genre writers too by the way. No cheating. Write a real novel. A real novel is hard to write.

I have a book that I'm working on. A real novel and I'm about to start my new project on top of it, and it's an even harder book to write, but it's also a real book, but more serious than my first book kind of thing. My first book is for me personally. It's my writing labyrinth. I was going to do a series based off it, but I'm going to start a new book. A much more serious book. I'm now ready to start an extremely serious book.

Learn editing. Write your books yourself and do all the work yourself. Don't hire anyone to help you and self-publish yourself when you have four to five books lined up, or the ten all these players want. I'm already an author. I've already written several books.

The best thing to do is do practice novels for years on end to learn storytelling and see how a book goes together, then attempt a real novel or two, like I'm doing. I just started my real writing. All my other writing was trunk stories, but I'm already an author. I woke up this year an author. This is my first month of being an author.

*When you become an author, you'll know it, because writing books becomes fun and easy.

I almost feel like I'm being watched. This guy lives next to me and he's a professional writer and reviewed my book. The rough draft to it. What are the odds? I resent him the commercial copy to be reviewed now too, but just a sample of the novel. Life is strange. I now have an author living next door to me. He's lived nextdoor to me for the past three years. I just met him. He's probably working on a story about me... not sure how I feel about all that...