I came up with a saying: The larger your manuscript file size grows, the more overwhelmed you become.

If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed about the size of your story, preventing you from moving forward, here are a few tips I found helpful:

Take a second to stop, walk away, and breathe. Sometimes taking a break from your work will clear your mind to have room to discover the answer of how to move forward with your story. Maybe you’ll even discover the answer is splitting your book into two, which happened in my situation. Once I decided to split the third (and final book) in my trilogy into two books, things just naturally started falling into place. And hey, having an extra book isn’t a bad thing! More sales!

Whether it’s with a book coach, a friend, a family member, or even to yourself, talking about it always helps. For some reason, whenever you start yapping about your story, venting about how difficult it is, how stuck you are, how you will never figure out a certain plot hole, or where your story will begin, or how to connect certain parts, verbally vocalizing it gets your mind thinking and brain working. And you’ll be surprised at how naturally the problem will be solved by just talking about it.

And if you’re talking to a friend, you’ll get their input on the situation because you need to…

The deeper into your story you get, the longer you invest in your world, the more you become biased and blind. A writer I was working with became so biased that they wouldn’t take any constructive feedback from anyone, and a lot of the feedback was to make the story STRONGER. However, this person was so invested in their world, that they refused to change anything. When really, the one thing they did need was to break out of their shell, let the world read their work, and to accept constructive feedback to fill in the holes that they no longer could see.

Writing alone is hard. Don’t write alone. Find a writing buddy to work through your writing issues.

When your manuscript does continue to grow, it’s important to develop a routine of staying organized. Keep track of your characters, back story, notes, world development, history, etc. But also, keep track of what is actually essential to the story.

Staying organized is key when dealing with a large manuscript.

If your story does become way too long, and things start becoming all over the place, I found it helpful to write chapter headings from start to finish of your story. Like a little outline. But this time, you’re committing to these chapter headings, and whatever happens while committing to them, happens. Just work with it, commit, and keep pushing forward to the end.

I once was a double major in math and engineering. So I couldn’t help but dust off my old calculator and crunch the numbers. Let’s say you are setting out to write a 300-page book, because 300 pages is standard in your genre. Well, if you aim to write 10 pages per chapter, which is a good number to shoot for, then that becomes 30 chapters you need to write. If you break that down even further into a 3-part story, that becomes 10 chapters in Part One, 10 chapters in Part Two, and 10 chapters in Part Three. And voila! If each page is around 300 words, then this comes out to be a 90,000 word book. Doesn’t seem as intimidating when you look at it like that. Develop your outline around that and take it one chapter at a time.

Open up a fresh document and make this document the one you will 100% stay committed to. That means, this is it, whatever you write down is what you’re going to be working with. Write down a little final outline, little chapter headings, crunch the numbers like before, maybe a quick synopsis of what you envision each chapter to be, and start filling it in.

This is the approach I will take after I finish this final first draft of my third book after splitting the book into two. I will copy and paste this final first draft into a new document, and move everything I have for the second book into its own document, and start clean.

You know your story so well at this point, sometimes it just takes commitment. Commit to your outline. Commit to your beginning and end. And stop outlining, stop writing more side stories, and just stay focused on what is essential to move your story forward. You will find by getting over your fear of actually working in this large document of a mess, and staying focused on the plot and story, that things will begin to come together.

So if you ever find yourself in a situation where you’ve written too much and you’re way too overwhelmed and stuck, realize that this is a great problem to have. You have enough content to fill an entire book! Celebrate! And when in doubt remember to commit to the story, stay focused on the plot, and take it one scene at a time. You got this!

Have you been thinking about writing a book (or song) and don’t know where to start? Or maybe you’re an experienced writer who has felt stuck and overwhelmed with a writing project? I’d be happy to talk it out with you over a FREE Discovery Call.