You’ve started your book. It’s been a few days or weeks, even months since you’ve written anything more. There are have been too many interruptions and now you have some free time to get “back on track”. You find that you’ve lost your sense of “flow” with your thought process. You begin to re-read what you’ve written and still you don’t know where to begin.

So how do you get “back on track” with your writing? Here are four tips that will you started:

1. Establish a consistent schedule. This is a schedule that you will only fail to keep in the case of an emergency. You have commitments and responsibilities, but think for a minute, if you can watch TV or surf the internet or even exercise every day, you can certainly find time to write each day. Do it on your lunch hour or during your commute if you have to, but do it.

2. Commit to achieving a word count and not carving out a specific amount of time. Start with 250, words, then 500 words, and then ramp up to 1,000. It might not seem like much but by achieving those word counts you can write a a short story in a week or two, a short nonfiction book in a month, or even a novel in a season.

3. Don’t rewrite until you’re done. If you’re writing a book, write. Re-read each chapter and then move on. Refrain from doing any self-editing or rewriting until you have a completed first draft of the entire book.

4. Rebel against order. There is absolutely no law that requires you to write your book in a specific order. You should have an outline for your book but you don’t have to write each chapter in that order. Write whatever speaks to you, what motivates you on any given day. Let your words flow, don’t force them.

The bottom line is simply – keep writing. Little by little you will get your manuscript completed. Just be gentle with yourself, don’t force your writing or your words. Just write.