Chris Baty is a freelance writer and writing coach whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The SF Weekly, and Lonely Planet guidebooks. Here’s advice from his book, No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days.

“The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent. It’s the lack of a deadline. Give someone an enormous task, a supportive community, and a friendly-yet-firm due date, and miracles will happen.”

“In the context of novel writing,,, you should lower the bar from ‘best-seller’ to ‘would not make someone vomit.’ Exuberant imperfection encourages you to write uncritically, to experiment, to break your time-honored rules of writing just to see what happens. In a first draft, nothing is permanent, and everything is fixable. So stay loose and flexible, and keep your expectations very, very low.”

“Rereading parts of your novel while writing is like doubling back at rerunning parts of a marathon midrace.”

“Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child),” Mau’s maxim went. “Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.”

Buy No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days on Amazon

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