I haven’t been quiet about the use of affirmations in my writing, and how I think they can help other write or find motivation to write. Here, I’m going to walk you through how affirmations for writers helped me finish the first draft of a novel I almost abandoned.
In 2021, I started a novel that I then abandoned for over 3 years thanks to a combination of imposter syndrome and perfectionism. Then, after finishing the first draft of another novel in 2024, I came back to it. In March 2025, the first draft was officially completed.
Affirmations were a major part of that journey, but how I used them changed, and it definitely impacted my ability to keep writing.
The background: why I almost abandoned the novel
Let’s run through a short background on what happened before I started to write again. I started writing the novel in January 2021, but I had started outlining the novel in December 2020. I’m a planner. That means it should be easier for me to write, doesn’t it?
Sadly, no.
Despite having a spreadsheet with an outline for every chapter of the book (which I happily ending up sticking to, though not exactly), I stopped writing after Chapter 4. I was incredibly fortunate to get some great feedback on the beginning of the novel, but that produced a whole new problem.
Suddenly, I wasn’t alone writing.
I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words at the time, but I was struggling with this sense of external pressure. Not only did I have to finish this novel and make it good enough to publish, I actually had people who were interested in seeing where it went.
I didn’t feel like I was able to write the novel to that standard. My own standards were high, as I suffer from perfectionism already, but to think about other people’s opinions too? It was too much for me.
The novel went mostly untouched until the start of 2023, when I put together a plan for NaNoWriMo, intent on writing at least 50,000 words for the novel. That would have put me close to the finishing line, based on how long my chapters were.
I wrote 3 chapters! And then I didn’t touch it again, until late 2024.
Picking back up where I’d left off
In 2024, I wrote a romance novel (you can find out about the process in my neurodivergent guide to writing a romance novel post) and actually completed it. Like the 2021 novel, I struggled to complete it, but I did finish it. I got stuck with that project further on than this one, so perhaps that helped me return to it a few months later to write those final chapters.
Either way, I’d actually written a first draft to completion. I was 28 years old, and it was the first time I’d ever written anything longer than 30,000 words and actually written the ending.
Affirmations were a part of that writing process too. Whenever imposter syndrome struck – not feeling good enough to write in the genre, the story being nothing like romance books on the market – I told myself: “There’s a place for everyone’s writing, including mine.”
After hitting 20,000 words on the romance novel, I started a new writing routine. With that came another affirmation: “One more word today is still one more word than yesterday.” This was incredibly relevant, because I had several amazing days of writing where I wrote thousands upon thousands of words… only to struggle to do more than a sentence on other days.
Once the romance novel was finished, I reflected on the process while writing the blog post linked above. I thought about my writing routine and where it had helped and where it hadn’t. Most importantly, I thought about the sense of accomplishment I had from finishing something.
So, I turned back to the abandoned novel in October 2024.
Outlining again
I tried to write. In fact, I think I managed to write a single chapter, but I didn’t record any of my struggles with it. I might have just written a few paragraphs to finish off a chapter.
But in November 2024, I realised I needed to go back to outlining. It wasn’t enough to read my brief summaries of what happened in each chapter. I needed to get more detailed. I wanted plot points and more detail on what to write.
With the support of the London Writers’ Salon Gold coaches – with two weekly Check-Ins on Mondays and Fridays – I set the goal. I was going to outline the rest of the chapters, with one page dedicated to every chapter in my notebook. Not an A5 page, not even an A4 page, but more like a B4 page, wider than your average A4.
It’s worth noting that I really struggled with this in November, but in December I set a firmer goal. I wanted to outline the chapters by the end of the year.
I managed it by 30 December. I remember sitting at my table over the holiday period and just writing, writing, writing until I had all of the chapters outlined. I’d outlined 24 chapters in just over a month.
Then I had to go back to writing.
Saturdays are for writing
Firstly, thank you, past Han, for actually making notes during those Check-Ins to see my progress and what I discussed with the Gold coaches of LWS. Having dates for each Check-In I attended has really helped write this next section.
At the end of December 2024, I wrote in my notes: “I’m feeling really hesitant about getting started, but I also feel really motivated now that I have all of the chapters outlined.” It was recommended that I note down how I’m feeling when I continued to write the novel. This led me to buy a reflective self-care journal, which later became an incredibly valuable tool.
The first Monday of January 2025, I wrote: “I felt really good about writing at the weekend. I wrote 2 and a half chapters on Saturday, and it took approximately 2 hours to write a full chapter. It felt amazing to work on it after so long, and now I want to keep it up.”
I’d made one small change to the document I was writing in between those notes. I’d chosen an affirmation from my masterlist of affirmations for writers and I’d put it at the bottom of the page, just two lines down from where I was writing. I put it in a different font and sized it up a bit so it stood out. It basically looked like this:
A first draft doesn’t have to be perfect.
Another, smaller thing I did as I progressed through the novel was to make small notes under the affirmation to come back to in the second draft. These mostly included inconsistencies in what language I was using, as well as things to research later (I had an awful track record of being caught up in researching instead of writing).
The next thing I did was to commit to writing on Saturdays; I made that commitment on the Friday of that week, when I realised that I had a lot of proofreading to do over the next few months. I really wanted to carve out time for myself, and given how well that first Saturday had gone, it seemed like a better plan than trying to write on days I worked.
And it was a good plan. I wrote another two chapters on the day after.
With all of the progress I was making, it’s unsurprising that I then made an honestly foolish goal to meet: I was going to write 2 chapters every week, and I worked out a “deadline” for finishing the novel. There was one planned interruption to my Saturday sprints, but otherwise I was going to finish by late March 2025.
When all goes wrong, think about what went right
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t keep up the pace of 2 chapters every Saturday. I started struggling in mid-February. Even my affirmation couldn’t prepare me for that struggle, because it was handling my perfectionism. Instead, my obstacle was how busy I was outside of writing.
The first time I didn’t manage to write 2 chapters in one day, I was disappointed. To my surprise, I realised I wasn’t disappointed with myself (something I expected when I registered what I was feeling) but at the situation. It was out of my control; I couldn’t help that I was busy with work and that a lot of my time was being consumed by keeping up with work.
I tried a few different ways to alleviate this struggle; I wanted to write a chapter on a different day, I wanted to take more rest days when I can, I wanted to fix or modify my writing routine. At no point did I change what I’d done with my affirmation, because I knew it was working for me.
Until March 2025, when I realised I had 5 Saturdays left to write my novel. It wasn’t just a self-imposed deadline, but it was when my Gold membership with the London Writers’ Salon was going to run out.
So now I had to finish over 10 chapters in my novel, while continuing to work 5 or 6 days a week (compared to my usual, preferred 4 days a week), before the end of March. How was I going to manage that?
Back in January, I’d attended a vision-boarding workshop. I still wasn’t convinced that vision boards were for me, or that they were helping me, but I had included some quotes. One of those quotes held the key for me, because instead of tackling perfectionism, it helped motivate me.
A quote attributed to Terry Pratchett (but might not have been) was on my vision board:
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
(I have no idea who the true creator of this quote was; some say Stephen King, others suggest writers I’m not particularly fond of mentioning.)
If the affirmation at the bottom of my page helped with perfectionism, I couldn’t replace it. They were similar quotes, but the power behind them was very different. If I wanted to use two affirmations, I had to think about how best to incorporate them into my writing routine.
That’s exactly what I did. While the affirmation at the bottom of my page was always present, I also read it to myself at the start of each writing session and whenever I felt I needed a bit more motivation. So I kept it there, and added the second affirmation to a kind of mantra form of meditation before I started writing.
When I opened my laptop, I spent 3 minutes as it loaded – sometimes while preparing a drink, but usually while journalling in the reflective journal I mentioned – just repeating to myself: “A first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
Was it the perfect solution? No. Towards the end of March, I continued to repeat the affirmations to myself, but I often found myself stuck in the middle of chapters. Which brings me to what helped me push through.
Finishing the novel with the use of affirmations
It was mid-March 2025 when I started really getting worried about not finishing the novel. At the Gold Check-In of Monday 17 March, my notes contained a structured plan of how I was going to write the last 5 chapters.
That day, I said, “I want to be done by the end of the month, so I’ve marked out this Saturday and Sunday to write, and then Monday and Tuesday, finishing on Friday and Saturday afterwards. If I only write as much as 1 chapter each day then I’ll be done.”
It didn’t go to plan, because it never goes to plan.
On the last Saturday of March, I resorted to writing the phrase “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story” like Bart Simpson in the opening of The Simpsons. I wrote it out 6 times midway through my writing session, and that helped refocus me enough to finish that chapter.
But I still had more to go. I did it again on Monday 31 March, with 1 and a half chapters left to go. When I was stuck, I wrote a few more lines.
It took me record time to finish that day. I’d finally finished my novel, 3 hours from the end of March. In 3 months, I’d written a total of 24 chapters.
Tips for using affirmations to finish your first draft
During those 3 months, I shared my process with other writers, several who expressed that they’d find it useful to have an affirmation or similarly positive reminder in front of them while writing too. One recommendation which stood out was the idea of putting it in the header and/or footer of the document you’re working in.
With that in mind, here are all the tips I have for you if you’d like to use affirmations to finish (or start!) your first draft:
- Think about your biggest obstacles and try to create or find an affirmation that directly tackles it.
- Make sure you put it somewhere you’ll see it: on a Post-It note on your desk, on the first page of a notebook, in the header/footer, or at the bottom of your page like I did.
- Don’t be afraid to change things up to suit you, whether it’s adding a new affirmation or swapping your current affirmation for something new.
- Sometimes it can help to have a different affirmation for different projects, especially for different genres or if you have particular worries or struggles about what you’re writing.
- Experiment with reminding yourself of your affirmation. Will you read it out before every writing session? Can you doodle it? Do you want to repeat it to yourself?
- Don’t feel the need to write your own affirmation. It’s okay to take a quote from somewhere else or to save something you read to use.
- Sometimes basic can be stronger than something more complex. Think about what will help you.