Slay the Smallest Dragon First: Beat Overthinking and Finish Your First Fantasy Novel

It's finally that time—no distractions, no work, no parents, kids, partners, or any type of human interruption. Maybe you’ve even put your phone on silent. You can finally get to work.

You sit in front of your keyboard and look at the white page in front of you, full of promise. This is your time to create the world you’ve always dreamt of. But as your fingers touch the keys, you stop. Would your idea truly captivate today’s fantasy reader?

You start to worry as more thoughts begin to fill your mind: Are your main character’s motivations clear enough? How should you market the book when it comes out? What scene should go on the cover page? Should you attempt to self-publish or try the traditional route instead?

At this point, you’re no longer writing—if you even managed to start. You’ve entered a new territory entirely: overthinking.

You’ve likely closed your promising white page and set off on a new quest—searching the web for answers.

You’re reading articles about character development, reviewing books in a similar genre on Amazon, and researching which publishers accept manuscripts from aspiring new writers.

What you have here is classic overthinking. And let’s face it—you can keep at it for days.

Conjuring Dragons

I think of overthinking as the art of conjuring dragons. And though dragons can be allies too, and have their place in the world, let’s stick to the old archetype here and label them as the threats you need to fight.

Each concern, each future worry, is a dragon.

Paradoxically, the further away your concern is—the more irrelevant it is to your current stage in the writing process—the bigger the dragon that represents it.

What I mean is that concerns about things far, far down the line tend to scare us more than immediate, small concerns. If writing a first scene is a young black dragon, worrying about agents and publishers is a mature and bloodthirsty red.

Each dragon is real and will have to be faced and challenged at some point—but that point may not be now.

You're not ready yet. Your swordsmanship skills are not honed, and you haven't gathered the experience you’d get from battling the smaller dragons first.

Not only that, but you're dashing from dragon to dragon, trying to decide which one to face first, only to find yourself never beginning one single battle.

And we’re leaving dragons out of it for a moment, here’s the straightforward version: you’re worrying about things you have no business worrying about now.

You’re overthinking, and overthinking is a surefire way to never finish the first draft of your novel.

The Battle Plan

So what should you do?

According to The Financial Diet, a good way to calm the mind when it’s tugging at your attention strings is to write the distracting thought down. This way, you’re telling yourself, “I am aware of this dragon, I acknowledge the threat, and I’ve made a note to prepare for it later.”

I took that idea one step further and revised it into a tool that helped me get through publishing my first book: Monsters and Heroes.

This tool took the form of the humble Excel sheet.

It might be the business analyst in me speaking, but going live with a new IT system is not all that different from releasing a fantasy book. And what all projects need is a Go-Live plan.

Your book does too.

A go-live plan—or in our case, a battle plan—lists all the steps and actions that must be taken before you’re ready to release (or publish). This is where you note each dragon you’ll need to face.

Each time you conjure—or become aware of—a dragon, open your Excel spreadsheet (or any other document you use to organize your plan) and note it down. This first step alone can help put your mind at ease.

Organizing Your Dragons

But what if merely noting the dragon down and getting on with your life doesn’t soothe your worrying mind?

This is where prioritization comes in. Prioritization is the stage where you sit down with your battle list and start organizing your dragons by order and intimidation level.

There’s a logical order to publishing: You must first finish writing your first draft. Then edit it (on all levels and forms). Once those are done, you’ll find yourself out of the creative realm and into the realm of design, marketing, publishing and finances.

Take the time and organize all the publishing-related activities by order. You can list individual tasks or group them into categories and prioritize those.

Now your battle plan is a sequence of events. And whenever you find yourself stuck (or never starting), look at the dragon you've just conjured and ask “Do I need to face it now?”

The answer, more often than not, will be “no”.

Conclusion

If you keep worrying about the big dragons before you’ve vanquished the small ones, you may never reach them.

Sure, you’ll have to think about your cover art—but not before you have a book. And yes, you’ll need to ensure your plot is airtight and your characters are well-developed—but there’s nothing to edit until you’ve written a messy first draft.

Organizing your dragons will sharpen your focus, improve your skills with every step, and move you closer to your goal: writing and publishing your first book.

Now close this tab (though if you found this article helpful, consider subscribing), get your battle plan ready, and get to writing. You’ve got dragons to slay.