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Scrappy Rough Draft

Use Science to Strategically Motivate Yourself & Finish Writing Your Book

Book cover as paperback and ebook with yellow background
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About The Book

Often, the main difference between a work-in-progress and a finished manuscript is the tenacity of the writer. You can see your idea play out inside your head in beautifully composed and communicated scenes. Then you start to write, but the words feel clunky. Your critical inner voice tells you your writing is not as good as it should be. You start to self-sabotage. You convince yourself that you don’t have enough time to sit down and do the work anyway. And your dream of writing this book remains as just a beautiful idea.

With practical and proven exercises, author and coach Donna Barker (aka romance author Danika Bloom) connects behavioral science to the habits and mindsets that successful authors use to finish their first, second, and final drafts.

Whether you’re writing your first book or your fiftieth, Scrappy Rough Draft has the tools you need to build self-confidence, develop a writing habit that works for you, and identify the kinds of people you need in your writing community to help you get your story out of your head and onto the page.

Whatโ€™s inside

From shitty first draft
to scrappy rough draft

 

โ€œPerfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.โ€ย  ~Anne Lamott

Virtually every writer can see our story ideas come to life inside our heads in beautifully composed and communicated scenes. The prose that floats around in our genius idea-brains is poetic and clear. In our mindโ€™s eye, the stories we want to share flow from our fingers as effortlessly as eagles riding thermals.

And then, we start to write. And itโ€™s hard. The story that has told itself in our head for months or years, decides to hide in dark corners and will not show itself no matter how much we plead and cajole and promise ourselves great rewards once the work is done.

 

Chapters

Pages

  • Science-backed research about motivation and accountability
  • Action-oriented exercises in each chapter, since changing behaviors requires more than simply reading
  • A solid rationale for asking specific questions of yourself and your process to make progress on your writing and publishing goals

โ€œBarkerโ€™s terrifically satisfying book ... offers strategies to bust through whateverโ€™s holding you back from finishing that scrappy first draft. Iโ€™ve not read its equal in my many years of reading how-tos and guidebooks around the craft of writing.โ€

~Jennifer Sommersby, author of Sleight

โ€œFilled with research-backed insights and revelatory exercises, Scrappy Rough Draft is a motivational gem that will fill your first drafts with promise, fight, and fire.โ€

~John Mavin, author of Rage

About the author

Donna Barker (akaย USA Todayย bestselling romance author Danika Bloom) is a former ghostwriter for progressive not-for-profit organizations who had to write in the voices of all her clients for over twenty years. When the voices in her head started to demand her attention, she set her mind to writing fiction.

Having taken ten full years to write, edit and ultimately publish her first novel, Donna wanted to understand how to make the process less painful and much faster for her next books. That led to a year of research into the science of creativity and her productive procrastination resulted in Scrappy Rough Draft: Use Science to Strategically Motivate Yourself & Finish Writing Your Book.

Using the tools and techniques she learned while researching and writing Scrappy Rough Draft, Danika (as she calls her own creative voice) has written and indie published five more novels, five novellas, two coloring books and a romance reader journal.

Danika Bloom