Make A Plan & Count the Cost

Making a plan prepares your mind for the work. You must make a plan before beginning.

Losing the Plot

Without a plan you’ll soon lose the plot of what and why you are writing. If you don’t make a plan, things from life will crowd in and it is likely you’ll stop writing. Because human nature causes us to work on what is important and because “writing a novel” will never seem important (compared to other things in you life), unless you make the work very important in your mind, then you will never complete the work.

Go All In

Writing a novel can be difficult (it doesn't have to be) so you must provide yourself with every advantage available. For the time while you're writing, you must focus on writing 100%. If you get distracted you will just waste time. Take it seriously.

Reading A Book Provides Example

My experience with reading a book is similar to the challenge of writing a book. Here's what I mean. If, at any time, while I'm reading a book I miss one or two days of reading then I often forget what the book is about and then I forget the reason I'm reading the book. I then start wondering if the book is worth completing or if it is a waste of time.

This is the same experience, only magnified, if you write your book slowly. Let's say you only write one page every week. You're going to lose your place, probably get bored and very likely forget why you're even writing the book in the first place.

What Are the Main Reasons for Making A Plan?

There are real reasons for making plan.

A plan (as we will create it) will include a chapter / scene list which will provide you with work to do every day.
The plan is our NovelTest - It allows us to see the high-level view of your story and if it makes sense or seems to fall apart anywhere
We can use the plan to measure our progress and decide what actions we need to take

Making a plan is the most important step toward writing our novel.

It saves you time - sure you can just sit down and write everything you know about your novel out, but you’ll probably write a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with your novel.
Provides a way to see progress Most people are overwhelmed by tasks that do not include a plan because they feel like the task will go on forever.

Next, we’ll talk about making a very specific plan that makes your daily work easier. We want our work to be easy so we have fun and don’t get bogged down and give up.