I have talked with close to two thousand writers about how their books got made, and I can count on one hand the ones who said they felt like writing most days. The rest of them wrote anyway. That is the whole secret, and I am sorry it is not more interesting.
We carry a picture in our heads of how it is supposed to go. The idea arrives, the writer is seized, the pages pour out, and three months later there is a book. I have never once watched it happen that way. Not for the bestsellers, and not for the first-timers, and certainly not for me. What I have watched, over and over, is a person sitting down at a set time in a set place whether they wanted to or not, and doing the next small piece.
I wrote in Narrative Threads that the Muse is a heartless, two-timing hussy, and I stand by it. She shows up when she pleases. She leaves without a note. If you wait on her, you will wait a long time, and the book you have been carrying around will stay right where it is, in your head, where nobody can read it.
So here is what I tell the writers I coach, and what I have to tell myself most mornings.
Pick an hour and defend it
An actual hour, on the clock. Mine is early, before the house wakes up, because that is the only time nobody needs me. Yours might be lunch, or the forty minutes after the kids are down. When does not matter. What matters is that it is the same time every day, and that the people you love know it is spoken for. Say it out loud to them. Write it on the calendar on the refrigerator. That hour is a promise to the version of you who wanted to write this book in the first place, and that person deserves to have it kept.
Make the first move small
The blank page is the hardest place in the world to start a day, so do not start there. Stop the day before in the middle of a sentence. I mean that literally. Walk away with the thought half finished, and tomorrow the first thing you do is finish it. You sit down with a thread already in your hand, and by the time it is tied off, you are writing. The cold start never happens.
Lower the bar until you can step over it
Two hundred words a day is a novel in a year and a half. That is plain arithmetic. On the mornings the whole thing feels impossible, write two hundred bad ones and go make breakfast. Bad words can be fixed. The words you never wrote cannot. Every writer I know who finished something did it by letting the daily work be smaller than their ambition, and trusting the days to add up.
Expect the wall
Somewhere past the halfway mark you will decide the book is no good and you were foolish to try. Treat that as weather. It comes for everyone, at roughly the same place in every book, and it passes the way a Mississippi thunderstorm passes, which is to say it does not care what you do, so you might as well keep working under the porch roof until it moves on. Do not open a new project. Do not go back and reread from page one. Write the next scene. The wall is made of the book you thought you were writing meeting the book you are actually writing, and the only way through it is forward.
Let the work be the pay
Nobody is going to hand you a feeling that makes the work easy. What you will get, some mornings, is a sentence that is better than you are. That is the pay. It comes without warning and never on schedule, and it only comes to the people who were sitting in the chair when it arrived.
You have carried this story long enough. Set the alarm. Leave a sentence unfinished tonight. In the morning, finish it, and see where you are by the time the coffee goes cold.