Thanks so much for joining me today! Today I’ll be talking about one of the biggest challenges that first-time scholarly book authors face, which is maintaining the motivation to write, day in and day out. You can find the full transcript of this episode at YourWordsUnleashed.com/2. 

When the semester is going full force, writing is often the first thing to drop off your to-do list. And then when summers and holidays finally arrive, you just want to rest and recharge and not think about work at all, which is completely justified and utterly necessary for a healthy life! 

In this episode, I’m going to talk about one relatively simple, but very effective, way to maintain internal motivation to keep working on your book manuscript no matter what else is going on in your life. And although it’s a pretty straightforward concept, it’s not one that gets talked about enough.

 So if you’ve been struggling to maintain momentum, I suggest that you close your laptop for a moment and put aside your planners, your time-tracking tools, your Excel spreadsheets, and all the different strategies you’ve been using to try to get your writing done. 

Instead, I invite you to do something you might never have consciously thought to do before, and that is to direct your attention inward to locate the deeper, more personally meaningful reasons why you are writing a book. 

As a writing coach for women scholars, many of my clients’ main goal is to publish a sole-authored book with a reputable academic press. But when I ask them why they want to publish a book, they often say things like “I need it to get tenure” or “I need it to prove myself as an expert in my discipline” or just more generally, “I have to write my book or else!” 

Now, don’t get me wrong, these are perfectly logical motivations. Book publication is often a key to moving forward in your career. It can propel you closer to the things you’ve worked so hard for and invested so many years to attain like getting a job, getting awards, getting known, and getting tenure, to name a few. 

But what do you notice about these reasons? Well, the fact is that they’re all externally based and they’re also rooted in fear—usually fear of failing. When authors frame their book writing in this way, this tends to suck out the inspiration. 

And in order to keep writing consistently in a way that feels good to you despite the many challenges you face every day, you need to be inspired by your work! 

Particularly for first-time authors, having such pressure-filled goals can provoke endless anxiety. Fear can stop you cold in your tracks as you think things like, “I’ve never done this before. I have no idea what I’m doing!” “I’m a total imposter!” or “Who am I to be writing a book?!”

So here’s a thought exercise: when you sit down to work and what’s running through your mind is something like, “I have to write my book,” how does that make you feel? What actions do you take in response? 

On a scale of 1-10, how motivated are you to continue working on your manuscript that day, and the next, and the next? 

Rather than speeding us up, thoughts like these exert an insane amount of pressure that can make writing feel like a heavy burden and slow you way down. If you’re not careful, writing can become an obligation instead of a fulfilling way to get your unique ideas and voice out into the world. 

 I know, because that’s exactly how I felt during the five plus years I spent writing my first book, which was based on another three plus years that I spent writing my dissertation! Looking back, trying to motivate myself to publish a book for external, career-related reasons wasn’t very rewarding to me and actually made it even more difficult to maintain momentum. 

I wasted huge amounts of time sit