Tips for Each Step of the Writing Process
- Galit Dotan
- Aug 18
- 5 min read
or: How to Actually Finish a Book Without Giving Up in the Middle
1 The Big Idea
How is a book born? Like a baby.
The truth? Sometimes the big idea comes even faster. You know how the best ideas often show up in the shower?
Every book starts with an idea.
The idea can be an intriguing scene, or an interesting conflict. Sometimes it might be a twist on something you read or watched.
Planning the book doesn’t have to be linear (just a few days ago I wrote that I believe good writing begins with the ending), but the idea must make you say:
“Wow! I’d love to read something like this!”
I don’t think you can really “force” an idea out. It will arrive when it arrives… but you can definitely speed it up.
Heard of writing exercises?
For example, the “Why?” exercise I wrote about here: Why do I write?
If you’d like, I can dedicate an entire post to writing exercises in the future 😉
2 Worldbuilding and Building the Plot
Every writing process is different.
Tolkien said he spent two years building his world before he began writing.
Me, on the other hand, when I have an idea burning inside me – I just have to get it out. Usually, I feel like spending too long on planning takes the air out of my tires. So I dive straight into writing.
“But planning is important!”
You’re absolutely right.
For a book to come out polished – it has to be planned. Here’s how I do it:
At the end of each writing session, I go over what I wrote and create “notes” for myself, capturing all new elements: characters, places, important objects. (If you’d like, I can write a whole post just about this.)
I start building the plot about a week after beginning work on the book. By then, the initial burst of creativity has started to fade, and I’ve proven to myself that this is a project I’m sticking with. Once I already have a draft of the beginning, the ending, and the climax scene, I sit down to plan the chapter breakdown. By the way, I wrote about this here: Saga.
3 Writing, Writing, Writing
call this stage “the habit.”
I believe that without the right habits, the book simply won’t happen.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you thought of a brilliant idea, sat down with full motivation at your computer, and wrote for three hours straight without lifting your hands from the keyboard. But then something happened – you had to go to the store, or to sleep, or your job called. You found yourself closing the file and moving on to the rest of life’s chores. And then… you never opened it again.
That happened to me just last week.
Actually? It’s happened to me more times than I can count.
Sometimes it happened after working on a book for a week, or two weeks, or even two months. You hit a writer’s block, leave the book alone for a few days. Then the days turn into weeks, and months… and the longer you stay away from the book, the heavier the task of returning to it feels. That’s natural!
As I said, I still fall into this trap, but here are the solutions that work best for me:
Reminders! Started a project? Set a schedule for yourself and add it as a recurring task in your calendar.
Writing habits! Try to write every day. Sorry – force yourself to write every day. If your days are busy, try setting aside ten fixed minutes for writing. And write in them. Even if you have no inspiration – write.
Think of it like this:
Say you want to reach 80,000 words. And say you write 500 words a day (trust me, if you stick to a writing routine, most days you’ll write much more than 500!), it will take you 160 days to finish your first draft.
4 Self-Editing
One problem that comes from not planning a book is that writers go back over and over again to fix gaps. Or worse, they fall into a terrible loop of one step forward, five steps back. That loop makes progress slow, exhausting, and often leads to abandoning the project.
So don’t!
Yes, you can occasionally go back and tweak things as you write, but the most important thing is to keep moving forward.
In other words, the real fixes – at the end!
My recommendation:
Every time you feel the need to fix something, jot the note down on the side. For example:
Add a hint in Chapter 2 about the box discovered in Chapter 18
Delete all mentions of Tzipora in Chapters 1–20, since the characters don’t know her yet
Add flashbacks of Yossi in Chapters 3, 5, and 9
As I wrote above, my recommendation is to create a clear plot plan after a week of work (about 3,500 words). At this stage, we already know what we want from the book (especially if we worked with the method: ending → beginning → climax → everything else, which I wrote about in Saga). After planning, you can and should edit the scenes you’ve already written to tighten them. But that’s it – after this round of fixes, move forward, and only come back at the end.
Once you finish the first draft, put the book aside for a week. This is a great way to “forget” what you worked on, so you can come back to editing with a clear head.
Do your self–editing slowly and carefully. Don’t skip anything! The tighter the book is when it reaches a publisher, the higher its chances of being accepted. And if you’re publishing independently, the more polished the manuscript is, the lower your editing costs will be.
5 The Publishing Process
Here is where the book leaves our computer and heads off into new realms.
Some books are born through traditional publishers. Some books are born through self–publishing.
If these words sound like gibberish to you – I’d be happy to advise you on the publishing path that’s best for you!
Either way, these are the stages the book will go through:
Developmental editing
Copyediting
Beta reading
Proofreading before typesetting
Cover design and typesetting
Proofreading after typesetting
✨ Publishing ✨
6 Celebration (Because You Deserve It!)
You did it!
Your book is out in the world, and you can finally rest.
Or think about your next idea – everyone celebrates in their own way 😉
Which of these tips have you already tried? And what in this post was new to you?
I’d love to hear in the comments!
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