The Book-Writing Progress You Keep Ignoring
Why the work before the "real writing" is the real writing
When I was writing my book, I spent several weeks setting word count goals for myself—the kind of goals that felt responsible and clear.
Write 2,000 words by Friday.
Draft this section by the end of the week.
And week after week, I wasn’t hitting them. The frustration was constant, and it came with a familiar story:
I should be further along.
Other people write books without this much struggle.
What am I doing wrong?
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize that the problem wasn’t discipline or even the quality of my thinking. It was that my goals were only counting one kind of progress, i.e., polished prose, while most of the work that was actually moving the book forward looked nothing like finished paragraphs. I was building the book, but my measurement system kept telling me I was failing.
This is a pattern I now see with so many scholars I work with on book manuscripts. The advice we get is to set specific, measurable, time-bound goals, and that advice isn’t wrong exactly, but it can quietly punish the very thinking that makes complex writing possible.
TL;DR:
Performance-based goals (like “write 1,000 words by Friday”) can fail because they only count final prose—not the thinking and strategy-building that makes prose possible.
Much of your most important progress looks like scaffolding: chapter notes, argument maps, alternative structures, and figuring out what the manuscript actually needs.
Sometimes you need goals focused on learning—what does the manuscript need? what does your writing process need?—through structured trials and regular reality checks.
The problem is that book manuscripts don’t produce progress in a linear, easy-to-measure way. You might sit down to write a section and realize, two hours in, that you don’t yet know what you’re arguing. You know what happened, but not why it matters to your larger claim. So you spend that session figuring out which example actually proves your point or discovering that your key concept needs a different definition if the argument is going to hold.
To be crystal clear, my dear readers, that is not a failed writing day. That is the work. But if your goal only counts finished prose, failure is exactly what it feels like.
And if you’ve never written a book before, there’s a second layer happening at the same time: you’re not only learning what the manuscript needs, but you’re learning what you need to make the manuscript possible. You’re figuring out how you write best, what conditions help you think clearly, and how to manage a project that stretches across years rather than weeks.
Most scholars view this dual learning curve as falling behind rather than building the capacity to do truly demanding intellectual work because the academy rarely acknowledges it.
Here’s the first thing I want to name plainly: for complex writing projects, some of your most meaningful progress won’t look like polished prose.
It will look like scaffolding.
The “scaffolding” might be a chapter memo where you finally articulate what the chapter is for in the architecture of the book.
It might be the moment you realize that what you thought was Chapter Three is actually two different conceptual moves that need to be separated.
It might be generating three alternative structures and noticing that only one of them makes the logic legible to a reader who isn’t already inside your head.
This is the intellectual work of writing in the humanities and qualitative social sciences: the argument isn’t simply “reported.” It’s built. And building takes testing, revising, and re-seeing.
Locke and Latham’s oft-cited review of goal-setting research supports this basic reality: when tasks are complex or not yet routine, there can be a time lag between setting a goal and seeing the benefits because people are still working out the strategies that will actually work. That’s not a flaw in your thinking—it’s part of doing complex work.
A lot of academic writers interpret this lag as “I’m behind,” “Or, maybe I’m not cut out for this.” I think a more accurate translation is: I’m still learning what the work requires.
If your goals only reward output, you’ll accidentally punish the thinking that makes output possible.
Here’s where I see scholars get demoralized in a painfully predictable way. They set a goal like “1,000 words a day,” but they only count words that feel polished enough to belong in the manuscript. That is, the day you spend experimenting with two different chapter openings, realizing your framing needs to change, or writing exploratory drafts that will not survive that day is considered a waste of time.
But that day was book-making, and if your measurement system refuses to count it, you will keep feeling behind no matter how hard you work.
This is especially corrosive for scholars who already carry the story that they should be further along, or that other people seem to manage this more easily, or that difficulty is evidence of inadequacy rather than evidence that the work is genuinely hard. When your goals confirm that story by only rewarding the final product, they quietly deepen the shame they were supposed to help you escape.
A more humane and more accurate goal, especially in a heavy thinking phase, is a time-on-task goal that explicitly includes the scaffolding work. Not “complete the second section,” but show up for the work that moves the project forward, even when forward looks like clarity rather than paragraphs.
For complex writing, the right question is often “What did I learn?” not “Did I hit the target?”
There are really two discovery processes happening at once when you write a book.
The manuscript is teaching you what it needs
You are learning what your writing process needs.
The goal isn’t to skip those discoveries. The goal is to move through them on purpose, without turning every week into a verdict on your competence.
Let’s say you’re stuck on a chapter opening because you can’t tell whether it should begin with a conceptual frame, an evocative vignette, or a key excerpt from your interviews. A push-through goal would sound like: Draft the first 3,000 words of Chapter Seven this week. A goal that respects the complexity of the task might sound like this:
Try drafting three different openings, then write a short note about which one makes the argument easiest to follow and what it forces you to foreground.
Experiment with your writing conditions: does one long block or several shorter sessions produce clearer thinking?
Notice what works and repeat it next week.
This kind of goal produces information, not just output. And for scholars who have spent years blaming themselves for not thriving under one-size-fits-all strategies (Locke and Latham’s research on goal-setting confirms this), that information is what finally breaks the cycle. The goal isn’t just to push. The goal is to find what works for you, in your actual life, with your actual brain.
You can’t adjust what you don’t measure, and you can’t measure what you refuse to count.
If you only count progress that looks like final pages, you will keep feeling behind because you are refusing to count the very work that makes final pages possible. Research on goal-setting confirms what I see with my clients all the time: goals work best when paired with regular reflection on how things are actually going (Locke & Latham, 2002). For example,
You assess whether your writing sessions produced clarity or frantic busywork.
You assess whether you avoided the hard decision, and if so, what that decision actually is.
If that sounds like one more thing on an already impossible list, I want to be direct: this process is not an extra step. This is the step that prevents you from spending months repeating strategies that were never going to work. Five minutes of structured noticing can save you weeks of spinning your wheels.
When you stop treating your writing goal like a production quota and start treating it as an iterative process of building clarity, you get to measure progress in a way that honors the real work:
You get to count the afternoon you tried three possible structures and found the one that made the chapter legible.
You get to count the week you discovered that you write best when your sessions are blocked like meetings you can’t cancel, because that discovery will pay dividends for months.
Over time, this is what a sustainable book-writing practice actually looks like: not one perfect routine that you either follow or fail, but a series of thoughtful adjustments where you learn what brings clarity, what creates momentum, and what merely makes you feel busy.
And that is not “less rigorous” than pushing toward a target. It’s actually more rigorous because it’s aligned with how complex ideas actually get made.
If you need help figuring out what’s actually working in your process—or if you can’t always see what’s happening when you’re inside the project—that’s very normal, especially when the argument is evolving and the work is cognitively demanding.
This is also how my coaching works: I create a consistent space for this kind of structured noticing and course correction, help you make the hidden work visible so you stop calling real intellectual labor “not writing,” and help you identify which strategies are actually moving your manuscript forward.