37: Stewarding Your Book in a Busy Season

Have you been telling yourself you'll write your book when life finally slows down?

Between work, family, business, and everything else on your plate, it can feel like writing a book has to wait for "someday." But what if the issue isn't finding more time—it's learning how to make it?

In this episode, I'm sharing a conversation that started around my own kitchen table and turned into one of the most practical coaching sessions I've had in a while. We'll talk about why so many women feel stuck before they ever begin, the two different ways authors tend to approach writing, and how to figure out which approach fits your current season.

Inside this episode, we'll cover:

• The difference between sprint writers and marathon writers—and why neither is better than the other.
• Why "I don't have time" is often only part of the story.
• A simple schedule audit that can help you create space to write.
• How outlines remove decision fatigue and make writing sessions more productive.
• Small writing habits that help you build momentum, even if you only have 15 minutes.

If you've been waiting for the perfect season to start your book, I hope this episode reminds you that progress isn't built in giant leaps. It's built one writing session at a time.

And if you're ready to stop wondering whether you're writing the right book and want a clear plan before you spend months drafting, I'd love to help. A one-hour Strategy Session is designed to help you clarify your idea, pressure-test your direction, and decide on your next step with confidence.

Cheering for you. You're closer than you think.

Transcript

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Welcome to For Women Who Write Podcast. I'm Michaela, a certified writing coach, editor, and self-publishing expert with over a decade of experience, helping women turn their ideas into powerful, best-funning books. If you felt the call to write, share your story, share your experiences, and how you can help other people, then you are in the right place. Here we talk about the real instance of writing and publishing, from finding your voice to structuring a book, from overcoming resistance and imposter syndrome to launching it into the world with confidence. My mission is to show you that becoming a published and best-selling author if it is possible. It's absolutely reached. Your story matters, and chances are you're closer to holding your finished book in your hands than you think. Hello and welcome to another episode of For Women Who Write. So I am recording this episode in mid-July. Summer still feels a little bit like it's in full swing. We actually just got back from our second beach trip of the summer. So I still feel thick in summer. But this episode is coming out at the beginning of August. And August, for most people, is definitely a month of transition. Kids are going back to school, maybe you are going back to school. The weather maybe kind of sort of is cooling down a little bit. And maybe some of those projects that you really wanted to get done before the end of the year all of a sudden have a lot more priority. So when I work with people, usually they want to start working on a book in January or in September, sometime, you know, in those kind of seasons of transition. So I know this because this is how I work, but also because I actually had a conversation with my husband last night on this very topic. So a couple of weeks ago, he really, you know, started to get very energized and inspired to pick up a book that he had started writing a little over a year ago. And he has a ton more clarity on what he would want to say in the book. And he started working on it while we were on our trip and wants to keep it going. And looking ahead at the fall, he's like, okay, I really think that I want to make a big push this fall to work on and write this book that he feels really inspired, really excited to work on. The issue is he is a teacher. He's not a teacher in the traditional sense of like being in a classroom. He runs an online ministry that teaches church leaders and church staff uh theology. And they run on a very similar semester program schedule that like normal schools do. So the churches that he is partnering with and is teaching, they all start in the fall as well. And thankfully, he has a very big course load this semester with several churches that he is going to be working with and working, you know, very in-depth with a lot of the staff as well. And so he is kind of looking at his fall and being like, how am I going to make this work? Because I obviously want to do a really good job for these churches, still be present with my family, and still work on this side project that honestly isn't immediately income generating. Because let's be completely honest and say, like kind of the elephant in the room, books aren't immediately income generating activities. It's going to take you some time to get there to write the book, publish it, market it, and all of that for it to start becoming a part of your overall ecosystem to be making more income. And maybe also, honestly, you don't necessarily even see it as a huge income generator. Maybe you just see it as kind of brand awareness or a book that you've always really wanted to write that's just really meaningful and important to you. So it's really hard to find spaces and time for things like that that may not feel, you know, completely urgent. And all of these other urgent things take the place. So I'm going to bring you into our conversation that we had so you can see how he is potentially going to do this this fall and how I would coach you if you and I were sitting across from each other and you really wanted to make this happen in the fall. What would I say to you? What would be really helpful advice for you as you make this work throughout your life? So the first thing that he and I talked about was the different types of writers that I see. That I really have seen that there's two different types of writing types when it comes to working on a book. The first one is a sprinter. The sprinter is someone who is going to take two weeks and they are just going to go hard on their book. They are blocking everything else out. They are going to go to an Airbnb or a cabin in the woods and they are just going to knock this out. They are sprinting and going for it. This is for a lot of people who like have had a message kind of building up in their brain over time and they're like, I can't not get this out. I was actually talking to a woman about a week or so ago who this is exactly her. Like when she has an idea, she blocks off three weeks in her calendar, and that's all she does, is she just writes her book. So she's definitely sprinting to the finish line. The other type of person is a marathon writer. So a marathon writer is someone who's going to pace themselves over time to get to the finish line. So this can look like sectioning off maybe 30 minutes three times a week to work on their book. They really, you know, want to just kind of slowly find margin within their schedule so that then they can work on their book and get it finished. It may take six months, nine months to get it fully written, but they're totally okay with that because they don't have a ton of time and they just want to slowly work on it and slowly kind of till the garden. Now, these are very basic ideas. There are a ton of caveats to this, and most people kind of overlap in some way. But the reason why I tell you this is because I want to show that there's not one way to write a book. I'm guessing you probably have it fixed in your brain that you have to write a book a certain way, that you have to have a cabin in the woods, that you have to have a very easy, open schedule that has hours of free, uninterrupted time. The reality is nobody has that, especially if you are an entrepreneur, if you are running a business, if you are a parent of small children, of older children, you will do not have a ton of margin. It is not required to have a ton of margin in order to write a book, because nobody has a ton of margin. Time is not given, it is made. It is made. So if you want to write a book, then I challenge you to rewrite the narrative you have in your brain that I have no time. Because the reality is nobody has time, and yet tons of people are writing books. They are making the time to have this be a reality. What is really likely happening is that you actually are having some fears potentially around writing a book. Maybe it feels really overwhelming to you. And what is actually true is that you don't want to find the time to figure it out because you're afraid of what might come up, because you're afraid that it's actually going to be way more difficult than you thought, because you are afraid that maybe you're actually not that great of a writer. You're afraid that this dream that you've had in your mind of writing a book and becoming a bestseller isn't exactly what you thought it would be. It's not as dreamy and magical as you thought. There may be a ton of other different fears behind that. So I want for you to revamp your thinking. Tell yourself that I will make the time to write a book. This puts you into the action. This puts you in the driver's seat. This does not make you a victim to time. This tells you that you have control over your time. Now, the reality is you still have lots of things to do. You still have lots of responsibilities. So there are a couple of things that you can do in order to make that time. One of my favorite, favorite strategies is to audit your schedule. So for a week, maybe two weeks, I want for you to do is to take out a journal or it can be on your notes app. And I want for you to record what you do every single hour. Are you managing meltdowns? Are you managing tantrons with kids? Are you making snacks? Are you working? Are you on client calls? Are you working out? Are you sleeping? And I want for you to record everything that you are doing. I think very quickly you will start to see that there may be some things you are doing that you actually don't need to be doing, or things that you could potentially delegate, or things that could actually wait for another season because they're actually not as important as they feel right now. And then I want for you to go through all of that. Go through, you know, what you've written down and make notes of that. What do you feel like could stay and what could potentially go? When you look at the two different types of writers, you may start to see if your calendar is incredibly full, that you need to be a marathon type of a writer for this season. Because you're looking at your schedule and you're like, yeah, there's just not a ton of wiggle room. Like there, there's just a lot going on. Then amazing. Find 30 minutes to an hour, whether that's in the morning, whether that's why your kids are watching a show, maybe it's something you time block whenever you have childcare or you have your work days, that you just time block off dedicated solely to writing. The key to, you know, actually doing this is to stay committed to your commitments. So when you make a commitment, you put it in your calendar and you say, hey, I am going to spend, you know, from 7 to 8 a.m. in the morning while the kids are waking up, they're eating breakfast, whatever, I am going to spend that time working on my book. When you have that in your calendar and you actually stick to that in your calendar, that's when you start making progress. That's when you start making time instead of being a victim to time and make that forward progress. Now, what I have found, I am actually low-key working on my own book. I have not been super public about this for a couple of reasons that I'm going to share in a few weeks, but I have found that mixing the two strategies has actually been incredibly helpful for me. So when I was first getting started with the book, I loved to marathon it. So I would just spend like 30 minutes every morning working on the book. The reason why that worked for me was because it was just about quantity at that point. I just needed to get words on the page. I didn't need to like sit for long stretches of time to think through the material. I just had thoughts. I just had ideas that I was going to put onto the page. And that was all that I needed to do. Just info dump, idea dump, all into the page. You cannot edit a blank page. You cannot edit a blank page. So I needed to have a not blank page. I needed to have filled pages. Those pages were not good. They were really not good, but I just needed to get it out onto the page. Then after I had, you know, a decent amount of ideas, I probably had anywhere between 15,000 to 200, 20,000 words of ideas, kind of sort of in chapters, because I had outlined my book and so I knew, you know, what needed to go in each chapter. Then I switched to more of a sprinter mentality, and I would have longer stretches of time in my calendar. So what I'm doing now and have been doing for the last several months is blocking off 90 minutes in my calendar to really sit and get deep into the material. This way now I can start to see like what I have and how can I make it better? How can I stretch this out? Does this actually need to go here? Do I need to delete it? And so much more. And it allows me to have a longer stretch of momentum so that I can think through my ideas way more clearly. So those two ideas of you know, sprinter versus marathoner are really helpful. You likely don't fall into one category exclusively the entire time. Maybe you do, but potentially you may fall into a little mix of both where you are spending, you know, long stretches of time working on it, but you're also kind of fitting it in within the margins of your life. Now I think it's important that we also talk about the writing session itself because a lot of times we have the best of intentions. We put it into our calendar and then something else kind of starts to sneak in, or there is something way more exciting and more fun to work on during that writing block than actually working on your book, and the book kind of gets put to the wayside. Guilty, I totally get it. Not here to judge or shame anyone at all because I absolutely understand. Writing a book requires a lot of deep thought, and it can be hard to switch into that mode. So let's talk kind of like pregame and how to write well and how to have those sessions well. Like, how do you prepare for those sessions well and then how do you do the sessions really well? So it can be helpful when possible to have these writing sessions on days that you can think very clearly. If you have some quiet space, I know if you have little kids, this cannot always be easy, but if you have some quiet space, if this means early morning or late night, jump on it. Don't be afraid of those. But try and find some quiet space where you can think really deeply. I also like to have a couple of like rituals that help me get into the zone for writing. So when I'm on my A game and I am doing this well, what I like to do is I light a candle. The very act of lighting the candle is very helpful for me to start triggering to my brain that this is what we are about to do. We are about to write, we are about to do some deep thinking. The smell of the candle also helps trigger my brain to get into deep thinking mode, recognizing, okay, it's time to shift into writing mode. And then I also turn on a playlist, and it's the same songs every single time that I write. And it's pretty funny because when I go back to reread my work, some of the songs that I have listened to as I was writing come back involuntarily. And it's just because my brain has been prepped for this work. So I hit on several of the senses. I hit on sense of smell, the sense of uh hearing to trigger to my brain that it's time to do this hard work. And it really does help me to get into the zone ahead of time and really prep myself. If possible, for me personally, I try not to do writing days on days that I have outline intensives or client calls. Those calls are so mentally challenging in the best way. Like my brain is fully on for those calls. And so there's not a ton left to give after those intensives. So I really like to schedule my time, my writing time on days that I do not have client calls. I'm just a little bit fresher. My mind is working much more easily. And again, if possible, I like to do them in the morning as well because I just am, again, way more fresh and, you know, fully there and fully present. This doesn't always happen. And that's the reality of doing this in the middle of life, is that sometimes the schedule doesn't always work out perfectly. That's okay. Do the best that you can and work with what you've got. It is way better to make imperfect progress than no progress at all. Because I think that these ideas that we have, they often wither. They kind of die away when we're not able to actually develop them. I kind of think of creative ideas like a pot of queso. If you've ever made queso before in a crock pot, it's so delicious. I'm dairy free and have been for a couple of years, and it is the saddest thing to me that queso makes me feel so sick. But when I used to eat it consistently, it was my favorite thing to see a big pot of delicious queso and some yummy tortilla chips. But if you've ever made queso in a crock pot and you haven't stirred it in a couple of, you know, minutes, 20 minutes or so, and you go back to it, it gets this really gross film on the top of it. It's like kind of crusty queso at the top. And you have to stir it in order to get it back to its creamy goodness. And I think of creative ideas a lot like a pot of queso, that you have to be continually stirring them. And it sometimes doesn't even have to be that much stirred, but it does need to be moved. It does need to be stirred about so that you don't get that crusty film at the top, that it's something that stays really good that people can enjoy. So just making some form of progress can go a really, really long way. So that's kind of the pregame before you are writing and working on your book. Now, what about the actual writing session? This is where outlines come in so very handy because for a lot of people, they're like, okay, great, I've pregamed, I've got all of my things, my senses are prepped, I'm ready to write. And you sit down, you open up your Google Doc, and you're staring at a blank page. There is nothing worse than staring at a blank page and not writing because so many doubts creep in, second guessing, all of a sudden maybe you have a new idea and you get distracted. There is way too much danger that can happen on a blank page. When you have an outline, you know what you need to write. And it can help make the writing sessions so very much more productive. I have had several clients tell me that they weren't really in the mood to write, they were just not feeling it, but they had an outline. So they didn't have the decision fatigue of what to work on. They just knew they had to work on it. The assignment was already made. It was non-negotiable. They knew what they had to do. They just went and did it. And that is the power of an outline is that you know what you need to write and what you need to work on, what you need to flesh out, what ideas you need to explain, what story you need to share can make the writing sessions go so much more smoothly, even and especially on the days that you're just really not feeling it. And it helps too if you only have 20 or 30 minutes. You're not sitting there being like, okay, so what should I write about? You know what you need to write about, and you can just go. You can just work on it during that session. I will also say, too, that I think sometimes we get a little myopic and think that writing has to be done on our computer at our desks. And that is so very not true, especially in our current day and age. A lot of people like to voice memo their chapters. This is something that hasn't been super helpful for me personally, just from the way that I think. But I have had several people who will voice memo out ideas while they're in the car or while they're going for a walk and then transcribe it and use that as a chapter. And when you have an outline, you've got your prompts right there. You know that in chapter three, you need to tell that crazy shark story that illustrates how very important it is to create funnels in your business, right? Like you know what you need to be writing on. And if you just don't have time to sit down in front of your computer or you just feel like you get a little overwhelmed in front of your computer, you can just take a voice memo on the go. Go for a walk. Maybe you're in the car with the kids, you're picking up the kids from school, you can just voice memo it, have it transcribed, and you've got a whole chapter right there. Boom! You just made time. You were not victim to your time, you made time. And that is the exact attitude you need to have in order to make this book a reality. So don't get so, you know, cornered into an idea that you have to have your candle and you have to have the same playlist, all of those things. Those are helpful for me, but they may not be helpful for you. If you are one of those people who can just kind of think on the go and that you are just can turn on your brain easily, and you already know what you need to write about. Then do this. Do a voice memo on the go. It does not have to be clean and perfect. It just needs to have something on the page so that then you can use that later and edit it later. So when you sit down to write, whether you're sitting down at your desk or you're on the go talking it out, whatever it is, know what you're going to write. That is going to be so very helpful for you in your session. It takes out that decision fatigue. And that is often where an outline comes into play. Other things that can be really helpful for you too is to resist the urge to edit during your writing sessions. When you are in the initial phases of working on your book, you just need to write. Get it all out on the page. That is most important. You cannot edit a blank page. At this point in writing your book, it is all about quantity, not quality. We want a ton of words on the page, even if they're slightly embarrassing, terrible words. We just need something on the page. So resist the urge to try and hit backspace. Resist the urge to try to research a ton on a story. Resist the urge to sound incredibly profound and wise. That's honestly not really the goal at this point. At this point, in the early phases of writing your book, the goal is to just get words down onto a page. Later, when you start working with an editor or you've, you know, already done a lot of writing, that's when you can start to make things way more clean. And when you have multiple of these writing sessions built on top of each other, that is how a book gets written. Ultimately, that's the goal is writing session on top of writing session on top of writing session. And when you can make those writing sessions really strong, then that just makes the whole process go much faster and easier. And so when you can have those sessions built on top of each other, that's when you can write a book. That is the ultimate goal. And so as you're looking at your calendar, as you're looking at your workload and things coming up for your kids, don't look at it as a whole book because that's that's way too massive. That's so big. That's not the goal. The goal is to have a 30-minute writing session and then another one and then another one. And in time, as you build those on top of each other, that is when you get a book written. So I hope this is really helpful for you as you're looking ahead at the fall, seeing what your schedule looks like. And I have a challenge for you. If you are listening to this and this feels really exciting to you, then my challenge to you is to try it. Try for one week writing for 15 minutes each day. See what happens. See what comes out. If you can squeeze in a 15-minute session, maybe you do it right before the kids get up, maybe you do it, you know, during lunchtime and the kids are occupied and you're able to get in a little bit of writing. Maybe the kids are, you know, at school during the fall and you have just a little bit of time right after you drop them off or right when you pick them up. Just find 15 minutes for a week and see what happens because I am guessing that you will be able to find more of that time and make more of that time when you start to change your mindset, when you start to tell yourself that I can make this time, that I can fit it into the middle of a really busy and full season of my life. And it's just a matter of making the time and not waiting for it to be given to you. So I hope this is really helpful for you. If you are interested in adding an outline to your overall writing sessions to help you get the actual book written, then a strategy session is where we would start. So outline intensives are two days, very intense, where you and I, you know, work through everything together. But if you're not ready for that just yet, which is very normal, most people are not ready for that just yet. We will do a one-hour strategy session. And we can do multiple strategy sessions if needed. But these calls are really there to help you see if you are ready, what does your book idea look like? What is your margin? Do you feel like you have the whole idea fleshed out? Like, are you ready to fully write the whole book? And that's what these strategy sessions are here for. And they're $147 as of this recording. And we get together, it's you and me one-on-one to really strategize your book and help you set you up for a ton of bestseller success. So if you are interested in that and want to book that before the kids go back to school or right around the time that the kids go back to school so you can maximize the fall, now is the time to book. You can get a link in the show notes to book a call, and I cannot wait to see you there.