How to Stop Overthinking While Writing a Book

The writer’s path is full of obstacles—from deciding what to write about to actually finishing a manuscript. But one of the biggest challenges is one we create for ourselves: overthinking.

For many writers, one of the main reasons they find it so hard to write a draft from beginning to end is that they keep getting themselves sidetracked by overthinking: What should the cover for this book look like? Is it YA or dark fantasy? How many goblins should ambush my protagonist in the forest scene in a chapter I haven’t gotten to yet? What if readers won’t like my book?

All valid questions, but all absolutely not relevant for the current stage you’re in, which is completing your manuscript.

If you find yourself overthinking when you’re supposed to be writing, you might be standing in your own way of a completed manuscript.

There are many things to figure out when it comes to writing and publishing a book, but attempting to solve future problems when your manuscript isn’t done yet can keep you from ever completing it.

The good news is that there’s a simple method to control overthinking. All you’ll need is:

1. An Excel sheet

2. An ordered list

Let me explain how this works.

From Overthinking to Bullet Points

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 concern, I acknowledge it, and I’ve made a note to deal with it later.”

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

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 writing (and publishing) a book. At the end of the day, writing a book is a project, and every project needs a Go-Live plan.

Your book does too.

A go-live plan lists all the steps and actions that must be taken on your way to completing (and hopefully, publishing) your book—starting from making sure the plot is internally consistent and ending with what font to use. The Excel spreadsheet allows you to capture all of that.

Each time you’re struck with a new concern, worry, or details that you’ll need to figure out way down the line, 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.

Prioritized Overthinking

But what if merely noting down a task or a concern 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 worry list and start organizing your concerns and tasks.

There’s a logical order to writing and publishing a book:

• Completing the first manuscript

• Editing the manuscript (on all levels and forms)

• Deciding on the cover design

• Completing typesetting

• Writing the blurb

• Coming up with a marketing strategy

To make sense of your list, you’ll need to put the various concerns and tasks in the right order based on where in the book writing and publishing process they become relevant. You can list individual tasks or group them into categories and prioritize those.

Now, instead of a worry list, you have a sequence of events. And whenever you catch yourself overthinking, refer to the list, ask yourself how far down the line this worry belongs, and reorder it.

Is it something to worry about now? The answer, more often than not, will be “no”.

Final Thoughts

Overthinking can make the writing and publishing journey, which is challenging to begin with, into a nearly impossible task.

But it’s easy to quiet an overthinking mind with the power of a nice spreadsheet and some numbers to help organize your various concerns and to-do items.

All you need to do is:

1. List all the things you’ll need to figure out later

2. Number and categorize them

You’ll get to worry about all of those, but later, when the time comes. For now, focus only on the task at hand and get on with your life.

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