How to make sure the writing gets done

I’ve been asked by a couple of friends, who have signed contracts to write nonfiction trade books, whether I have any advice on how to make sure the book gets written. I think in general non-fiction trade writing is quite a different challenge from academic writing, which I discussed here in 2022, when I was working on Limitarianism. But how does one actually make sure the writing gets done, especially if one has a job (academic or otherwise) that already consumes more than 40 hours a week and is prone to procrastination?

Here are some lessons I learnt while working on my book from the Fall of 2022 till the Summer of 2023.

First, yes, one needs dedicated time set apart. I was on leave when I wrote my book (which, under the Dutch system, is actually just holidays one has saved up for many years, but that’s a discussion for another day). I cannot imagine how I would have written the book otherwise, in such a short timeframe. To make things worse, the interest of publishers was so great (with the translation rights for half a dozen languages already sold before I started to work on the book full-time), that I felt daunted. And then, for the first time in my life, I had writer’s block. I was scared I had entered a world (–it’s an industry, really–) where I wasn’t sure I could deliver, and I was freezing.

I was showing very bad signs of procrastination. Slowly but surely getting pretty desperate, I asked my friends on FB for advice on how to treat writer’s block. One of them, Dominic Roser, reached out and offered to be a writing buddy for a month or two, as he also had a book to work on with a hard deadline. I was worried that committing to being writing buddies would create another promise, and hence would create even more anxiety and pressure, but Dominic reassured me that if it didn’t work for me, I’d just have to tell him, and that was it. So I agreed with the experiment, having nothing to lose. It worked like this: every morning, we would send each other an email detailing up to three goals for the day (e.g., writing 1000 words, conducting an interview, reading a paper, sorting out references), and reflect on how the previous day went. In principle, we didn’t need to respond to each other’s emails, but often we did, briefly.

It worked like magic.

When I told my sister-in-law about the surprising effect this had on de-blocking me, she wasn’t surprised – she responded that it all made sense since the underlying mechanism here is an accountability mechanism. As a writer, you are no longer just on your own with your writing, but there is someone else walking the path with you, to whom you are accountable, and to whom you have to explain if you decided instead of writing to play video games the whole day. As a result of knowing that you are accountable to someone, you make sure you have something to report; perhaps something like your professional honour or your credibility is at stake?

So, for my dear friends who have signed book contracts with firm deadlines, this would be my #1 advice: team up with a writing buddy.

In addition, there is the issue of just blocking time to write in general. For full-time writers, the problem might well be income: if they don’t find a source of income (e.g. a writing grant) to do the research and writing of the book, they can’t even start. For tenured academics, the problem is generally not income but time. Academia is a greedy monster, and now, with the current financial strains and authoritarian political regimes that are cutting our budgets, it is even more so than before. In 2022, I decided to reduce my contract to 80%. That implies a bit less teaching, but also that, in theory, I should work four days a week and have the fifth day for nonfiction writing (or go for a walk). Sadly I have to report that, so far, this hasn’t worked out entirely as I had hoped, though I have been using that 20% time to give a zillion interviews and talks on limitarianism, which I wouldn’t have had the time to do if I had a fulltime contract (also, it might wel be that in terms of percentages, the overwork has only gone up, as it has hardly decreased in terms of absolute hours). I guess that, whether one has a full-time contract or a part-time contract, setting aside dedicated chunks of time (two half days a week, a day, or here and there a few full days) and then defending that time against the never-ending stream of other demands, is absolutely key if one wants to write a book. I receive a vast number of requests and invitations that require too much mental energy to make decisions about, and I am also terrible at saying ‘no’, so my advice here is pretty useless – except for the common advice to cluster dealing with emails, and then use an app such as Freedom to protect yourself from email or social media while writing.

To all of you who have written a book with a firm deadline: please share your tricks!
And to all of you writing a book in 2026: Good luck!!