You don’t have to start your draft at the beginning. In fact some people think it’s best to write the introduction after you’ve written the rest of your project. That way, you’ll avoid promising things in the introduction that you don’t get to. Or promising less than you actually have.

If there’s a part of the project that you know will be tricky or challenging, think about starting with that. Maybe chip away a bit each time you work on your manuscript. And when that section gets too challenging, turn to others that you can work on.

If there’s a part of the project that you know will be pretty straightforward to do, maybe start there. Or save that one for a day when you get stuck somewhere else.

Use placeholders. Things like “Description of research process goes here.” Using placeholders for certain parts or even certain sentences that you want to put in the draft lets you focus on finishing a section or even a paragraph without getting stuck. You can plan to remove the placeholder when you’re rested or have had time to consult sources.

One more thing

What makes one organization better for your writing project than another? If the new organization is clearer and easier for your readers to follow, it’s better.

The most common reason that writers update their outlines or writing plans is because as they write they figure out that a particular section will have too much information in it. Or it tackles more than one aspect of your big idea.

In other words, the original section as planned will be too hard for the reader to follow.

A benefit of having smaller, more focused sections is that you can finish them faster. The more sections of your draft you get done, the more forward momentum you have.

Next: Even more strategies

Detailed outlines help some people write clearly. For others (me included) they are more bother than they are worth.

If you don’t have a detailed outline, you still need a plan. At a bare minimum, you need to have a way of dividing your project into sections that will make sense for the people reading it. I call it a writing map.

A writing map is a list of the major points you want to make in the order you want to make them. And it includes what sources or other outside material you will use.

It divides the larger project into smaller segments that will be easier for your to write and easy for your reader to follow.

An outline or map can change (and probably will) as you work on your project. That’s a good thing, because it usually means you’ve found a better way to organize your project.

Next: More strategies

You’ve given some thought to who your readers will be.

You can state your big idea in a sentence or two.

You have a plan for how you will use the time you have.

So now what?

Start writing that working draft. In the last few posts in this series, I’ll give some success-focused strategies for approaching your writing.

The second challenge of having D-day is that you’ll need to revise your own writing. What exactly does that mean?

You need to get some feedback about how easy it is for someone to follow the points you make in your writing.

First, you should take a look at your working draft yourself.

Second, you can ask a colleague or friend to review your draft.

Finally, you can use a professional editor.

Each of these approaches has benefits and drawbacks. For more thoughts, see A Down and Dirty Guide to Revising Your Draft.  (Coming soon.)

So what now?

If rewards alone don’t keep you writing steadily, try to set up your worktime so that you have a small victory every day.

For longer documents you can think about D-days for each part of your document.

Need even more structure? Set a “mini D-day” for each time you work. Pick a section or even a part of a section of your writing that you will finish it in that session.

Even a tiny bit of progress is better than no progress at all.

Whatever gets you closer to D-day.

Next:  I have to revise this thing?

When you find your D-day date slipping into the future for whatever reason (and we’ve all been there), fight the slippage by thinking of the rewards of finishing the working draft as soon as you can.

First, it will be done. Sure, you will still have to revise it. But you will have just met one goal. Success breeds success.

Second, it will be easier to revise the imperfect working draft than to stress yourself about getting that draft done or trying to make it perfect.

Third, leaving as much time as possible to revise will mean you have a better final product.

Need more concrete rewards? Promise yourself a treat when you get your working draft done. An upgrade at the drive-through coffee place? An episode of a favorite show? A quick workout or walk with the dog? Falling into some online rabbit hole?

Next: Need something even more specific?

Two things make the D-day idea I’ve been talking about in these last posts challenging.

First, it’s a self-imposed deadline. So if you are having trouble meeting it, you can simply move it back a day or week or more. Still not finished? Move D-day back a little further. And further.

If you’re working with an external deadline, that can mean that D-day slides all the way to the last day you have for your project, and you end up with no time to revise. And then you are handing in a first draft, which is never a good idea.

If you have a self-imposed deadline, missing your D-day can cause the whole project to slow down and if it keeps slowing down, it will be dead in the water.

So how do you fight D-day slippage?

By creating a D-day for your writing project you think of it in a new way. You no longer have a single deadline that becomes a larger and more freighting monster the closer you get to it.

Instead, you look at your project as a two-part process in which you create your working draft and then have time to revise it.

Your D-day deadline still might be a monster, but it has less time to get so large that it overwhelms you.

Knowing that you will have time to revise the working draft takes some of the pressure off your writing.

The working draft you produce does not have to be perfect. In fact, you are giving yourself permission for it to be imperfect.

It’s been said that all good writing comes out of rewriting. Use this fact to your advantage. If you’re stressed about your writing project, channel that energy into just getting the working draft done.

If you’re having trouble getting started, focus on just getting the working draft done.

Remember the Nike slogan? Just do it. But that can be easier said than done.

D-day for you writing project is not the day it’s due. Or the day you actually hand it in.

D-day is the deadline you set for finishing the working draft. And it should come as far before your actual due date as you can realistically manage.

There’s no easy rule for when to set your D-day. Halfway through the time you have for your project? Three quarters? Three days before the deadline? A week before?

You’ll have to pick your D-day depending on how you work, how much you procrastinate, and what other commitments you have for your time and attention while you are writing.

But you need to set a real date. The next post talks about why.

Before you can set a date for what I called “D-day” in the last post, we have to talk about what we could think of as the first rule of successful writing.

It’s simple. Easy to remember.

And really hard to observe.

The first rule of successful writing is  that you never hand in the first draft.

No matter how perfect you think your first draft is. No matter how much it cost you in blood, sweat, tears, lost sleep, and caffeine consumption. You never hand in the first draft.

Finishing a first draft takes a lot of time and effort. When most people reach that goal, the last thing they want to do is turn around and revise that draft.

And in fact some writers turn their first drafts over to professional editors. But not everyone can do that.

So what do you do? It’s time for D-day.

Thinking about who will read your writing is pretty straightforward. Coming up with a short summary of your main points is a little trickier, but you can usually get something down in writing to get yourself started.

But if you’re like most of us, when you start thinking about how much time you have for your project, that’s when things get a lot more stressful.

I don’t have any magic bullet that can help you manage your writing time in a way that guarantees success.

But what I can do is to help you make the time you do have a little less stressful.

Let’s assume that you have a witting project that you need to complete. And you have some kind of a deadline, either a hard deadline given to you by someone else or a self-imposed one. (If you don’t have a specific deadline, come up with one.)

So you know how much time you have to get your writing done.

As you visualize that chunk of time, the most important thing you have to do is set a date for D-day. In the next post, we’ll talk about what that means.

To be fair, I should point out that the blurbs that appear on the back of nonfiction books and abstracts for articles are usually written only after the book has been completed.

It’s always easier to summarize your main idea when the writing is done.

But as you sit down to begin your work, you need to have in mind a clear and short statement of what it is you are trying to give to your audience.

The best way to approach any writing project is to think of it in parts. You need to start by understanding what it is that you are breaking up.

It’s perfectly okay if your big idea is a tentative. Most writers at the beginning of a project are in a chicken-and-egg situation. You have to have a starting point for organizing your ideas.  At the same time, that central idea will develop as you write about it.

You need to start somewhere, though.

Take a minute and write that brief description of your main idea. Actually write down the words.

Remember, three sentences, max. Try for two. Or one.

Step Three:  Know how you will use the time that you have.

When I was teaching writing, students who were having problems completing an assignment would often come to me for help.

They would show up in my office with laptops, hard copies of their drafts, books, articles and start pulling them from their backpacks. They had tons of stuff with them.

I would ask them to leave all that alone for a moment and just sit down at my desk and in their own words tell me what their paper was about.

If we could spend some time working that out, they usually could see a way to fix the writing problems they were having.

Like our question about who you are writing for, this one sounds simple. And in a way it is.

Pick up any nonfiction book, and on the back cover you’ll usually find a short paragraph or two that describes the book’s main idea.

Can you answer this question for your writing project?

Pretend you are talking with a trusted colleague or your significant other and trying to explain to them in a few sentences what you are writing about.

Actually sit down and write it out. Three sentences max.

And no fair saying, “It’s hard to explain” or “It’s really complicated.”

Why is it helpful to state the main idea in a sentence or two?

Thinking about the real people who will be reading your words is one way to break through any writer’s block you may be having.

As you sit down to write, don’t think of yourself as staring at a blank screen. Think of yourself as starting a conversation about your ideas with real people, just as you’ve done many times with colleagues, friends, students, and stakeholders in your institution or organization.

And think about the different groups of people you’ll be conversing with. In general, you want to think of yourself as speaking to the widest possible audience.

Keep that large audience in mind as you decide how you will explain things to them.

From an editor’s point of view, thinking about your audience is crucial.

As we work through your document, every time a question arises about the organization, the wording, and the design of your project, we’ll resolve it by considering the needs of the audiences who will be reading our finished product.

To be a successful author, you don’t just want to write words down. Your job is to get your words across to the people who will read them.

 Step Two:  Know your big idea.   

This might seem a strange place to start, but from an editor’s perspective, I would say that it’s the most important thing that you need to know to get started on your writing project.

It’s also deceptively simple. If you’re a scholarly writer, you might say, “That’s easy. It’s for people in my field of study.”

If you’re working on a corporate or institutional report, your answer might be, “It’s for the people who told me to write it.”

But even those apparently straightforward answers are actually not a simple as they seem.

So you’re writing for scholars in your field. What exactly does that mean?

For people who have exactly the same level of knowledge about the subject as you do?

For people who work in your area of specialization or everyone in your general field? People in allied fields?

Could your writing ever be used for entry-level students? Is it possible your eventual publisher might try to widen the audience for the ideas you propose?

And if you’re working on an institutional or corporate report, who’s really going to see it? Current staff? Potential donors? Foundations who might be considering giving a grant to your organization? People you want to recruit as volunteers? Members of in the community where you are located?

See? Not as simple as it sounds.

Next.  Why Is it helpful to know who you are writing for? 

When I give presentations about writing and editing, I ask the audience how they feel when they have to do formal writing for their academic careers or for work.

I give them a scale of 1 to 5, with one meaning “I love it” and five being “I’d rather have a root canal.”

Almost always, well over half the group says that their attitude falls on the upper end of the scale. Writing for them is stressful and somewhat overwhelming.

I’m not a psychologist, but I know that I feel frustration or anxiety when I find myself in a situation where I feel stuck and I cannot figure out what to do next.

Based on my experience as a teacher of writing, a writer myself, and an editor, I’ve come up with a series of three practical steps you can take to make writing less stressful and get your project completed.

Step One: Know Who You Are Writing For

Should you write from an outline?  The answer depends on how you approach the writing.

First, a quick definition. An outline is a very detailed plan of exactly what points you will cover, the order in which you will cover them, the details you will include, and the sources, if any, you will use.

Working from an outline works for writers who are super-organized and who can put off any actual writing until every bit of preparation and necessary research is done.  If you work this way, a detailed outline is probably a good option.  This approach assumes that nothing will really change as you write, that you will create a document that fleshes out your outline.

If you  want to leave yourself open to the possibility that your ideas and organization might evolve as you are writing the first draft, or if you stress out about producing an outline, or if you want to jump in and start writing before you’ve planned every last detail of what you will say, then an outline is probably not the way to go

So how do you organize your writing if you think your ideas and organization will evolve as you work? That’s the topic of the next Quick Tip.