Hi Reader,

I was in my late thirties when I decided I was going to write a novel.

Then I had two children under ten, a full-time job, and a house that never stopped needing something. I started, then stopped. Then I kept telling myself I'd finish when things calmed down.

Things did not calm down. That is not what things do. In fact, they became more chaotic when I had a third child.

And finally, it worked, and I finished my debut novel, They Called Me Wyatt, which wasn't a burst of inspiration. It was smaller and much less romantic than that. I picked an hour — early, at 6:00 am before the house woke up — and I treated it like a meeting I couldn't move, and I gave myself a goal of finishing before I reach the age of forty.

And I stopped waiting to feel like writing.

This is the part nobody tells you, and I wish someone had told me sooner: motivation arrives after you sit down. Never before. If you're waiting to feel ready, you will wait for years, and you will believe the whole time that the problem is discipline.

It isn't discipline. It's that nobody gave you a system.

And I did, I finished the first draft of my novel on the exact day I turned 40.

---

Since then, I've coached a lot of writers, and I've watched the same thing happen over and over.

Eighty-one per cent of people say they want to write a book. Fewer than three per cent finish one.

Every single writer who has hired me could write. They had the idea. Some of them had 35,000 words already. What they didn't have was a structure that made the writing happen on a Tuesday when nobody was watching.

So we build one. Same five steps, every time.

We don't start with writing. We start with who the book is for and what changes for them. Four days. Nobody wants to do it. And it is the only thing that carries you through month two, when the middle gets hard and you can't remember why you began.

Then an outline that's good enough. Not right — good enough to make tomorrow's writing obvious.

Then the number. 500 words a day. About an hour. Over 120 days that's 60,000 words, which is a first draft.

Not because 500 is magic. Because it's the largest number most working adults can actually hold for four months without quitting. Two thousand a day is a wonderful first week and a dead third week. Five hundred finishes books.

Then a checkpoint every seventh day. Three questions, and the order matters more than the answers: when did you actually write this week, what stopped you, and where are you stuck. Craft last. Look at the word count before you name what stopped you and a check-in turns into a verdict — and verdicts are what make people quit.

Then, at the end, publishing. Traditional, hybrid, or your own. There's no correct answer, only the one that fits the book you've just written.

I've written all of it down.

​The Book Finisher Sprint is a 14-page guide and a tracker. The guide is the five steps, with the worksheets I use on calls — your why, your reader, your chapter map, the messy-first-draft checklist, the publishing decision.

The tracker is the part people write to me about. You put in six numbers, and it gives you your real daily target and your honest finish date, recalculated every time you log a day. Not the date you've been telling people. The one your actual pace is pointing at.

​It's only $19. It's the whole system I run one-to-one, without me in the room.

​Get the Sprint →​

Natasha

P.S. One thing from the guide you can use today whether or not you buy it. If you're stuck — properly stuck, staring at a scene that won't move — stop writing forward and write the back cover copy instead. Two hundred words. The version that would make a stranger pick it up in a shop.

If you can write it, you'll usually be unstuck by tomorrow.

Get the Sprint NOW!

Stay creative,
Natasha

Stay creative, folks!

---