What works for me will not necessarily work for you, but here's what spurred me into productivity, in no especial order:
1) Advertise what your deadline is. It then becomes a matter of saving face and personal honour that you achieve your own target, otherwise you look like a lazy slacker to your friends. 2) Corollary to this, make sure your friends know to richly mock you if you miss your target. I am blessed with a surfeit of friends ready to richly mock me. I'm just lucky like that, I guess. 3) Set realistic deadlines, but don't allow much slack. Just enough pressure to put yourself under, well, pressure... 4) Be prepared to ditch other projects until the first one is finished. It got to the point with me that I even rationed my LJ posts to prevent myself losing steam.
Apropos of nothing, I wasn't helped by the fact that approximately two thirds of the way through the book i realised I was writing a completely different novel to the one I originally thought I was. Rather than go back immediately and rewrite parts one and two, which was my initial instinct, I soldiered on and finished the draft, then went back and extensively rewrote the whole shebang. I think this had a considerable bearing on finishing.
I made a post a few months back about dread. I went back and reread it a few days back, and it's all still true.
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rosecarmine
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Date: 2005-05-12 07:45 am (UTC)1) Advertise what your deadline is. It then becomes a matter of saving face and personal honour that you achieve your own target, otherwise you look like a lazy slacker to your friends.
2) Corollary to this, make sure your friends know to richly mock you if you miss your target. I am blessed with a surfeit of friends ready to richly mock me. I'm just lucky like that, I guess.
3) Set realistic deadlines, but don't allow much slack. Just enough pressure to put yourself under, well, pressure...
4) Be prepared to ditch other projects until the first one is finished. It got to the point with me that I even rationed my LJ posts to prevent myself losing steam.
Apropos of nothing, I wasn't helped by the fact that approximately two thirds of the way through the book i realised I was writing a completely different novel to the one I originally thought I was. Rather than go back immediately and rewrite parts one and two, which was my initial instinct, I soldiered on and finished the draft, then went back and extensively rewrote the whole shebang. I think this had a considerable bearing on finishing.
I made a post a few months back about dread. I went back and reread it a few days back, and it's all still true.
Endings are really, really hard to do.