Deadlines. Yes, I know. I hate them, too.
Regardless of what you think of them, deadlines are a necessary element to any writer hoping to keep afloat. Throw out any talk of a muse. Quit complaining about writer's block. If you want to keep your head above water, it means writing when you least want to write until you're back on task. Get yourself a pair of mental pliers and be ready to start pulling teeth.
If you're publishing for an editor, respect the deadlines. Anyone working a 9-to-5 has to drag themselves out of bed each morning to get to work on time. Your 9am is just several months out, and getting out of bed involves something like 80,000 words, but the idea is the same: be on time. Yes, extensions are common (if not par for the course), and you may need one no matter how well you plan. Prep like you don't have one. You can reward yourself with downtime once you're ahead of schedule.
If you're self-published (or working on your first novel in hopes of getting it published), deadlines are going to be difficult. Setting them? No. Keeping them? Yes. When you're the only one you're responsible to, it's very easy to be a nice boss and give yourself the night off. Again. Case in point: this blog post comes on a night when I vowed to write 3,450 words, a full third of which are instead going to use here. It's either going to be a very late night, or I'm about to be in some serious debt to myself.
Writing a novel is a lot like paying a loan: if you do the minimum required to get by, you're going to wind up wasting a lot more time in the end. If you instead pay it forward whenever you have the time and energy (or just the sheer willpower), you'll be a lot better off in the long run.
Word count makes for an easy milestone if you're a numbers person. Promising yourself thousands of words at a time makes it easy to ensure that you don't spend all your nights penning up the short, easy scenes of a novel and leave all the long, rambling narratives for the week before it's due to be sent off to the printers. It also lets you predict the time commitment ahead so that you know how realistic your deadlines are.
If you prefer to measure forward progress by the chapter or scene, remember to slice up larger scenes and chapters into measurable (and manageable) pieces so that you don't wind up choking on one particular piece and wasting more time staring blankly than writing. Instead of planning on word count by the week, you'll have to set mile markers at given scenes throughout the span of the novel and hope that you're estimates are at least vaguely accurate. Slipping one deadline with this model isn't disastrous. If you find yourself slipping more than two in a row, it's time to reevaluate your estimates.
Enough on setting deadlines, more on how to keep them. If you're a professional writer (and not a professional anything else), then you don't need much motivation to keep deadlines. The faster the work is out, the sooner the next offer (and its advance) can come your way. For the rest of us, if you don't want a one-year novella from becoming a 10-year ordeal, you need some motivation in the short term.
Reward systems are one way, but much like with exercise, the reward system shouldn't detract from what you're doing. Find a reward that is entertaining but not too distant from what you're doing initially. Just about every novel you can think of will share common elements with a variety of entertainment media. Find a game, a show or a movie that matches the themes or tone of your work and use it to relax with when you hit your word count.
If you need more bite-sized motivation, set up a tiered system: every 1000 words equals one episode of your favorite show, one more level in the game you love or one more chapter in the book you're seriously hoping to emulate. That way you can easily sink back into the work once your reward is over. One important rule: try not to spend more time on your reward than on your writing. Don't drop 500 words and then take the entire afternoon off for a Lord of the Rings marathon. On the other hand, a few hours of writing on a weeknight should be rewarded with an evening out another night that same week, if you can manage it.
If music is your thing, force yourself to wait till you can "afford" new songs with new scenes. Each chapter you complete, you can buy a song, plus a bonus album if you finish the book on time. If you're a drinker, go dry: every 500 words is a glass of wine, a beer or a shot. Pick your poison. Just be cautious of writing beyond your tolerance. When you wake up to dialog like "No, you're a butt," you know you've gone too far.
Whatever it takes, force yourself to slug on through and make your deadlines. A deadline a month is typically the best approach. Daily deadlines for a part-time writer are all but out of the question, and weekly deadlines are likely to wiggle too much with the stretch and pull of your day-to-day life. Inside of a month, you have enough flex room to make things even out. Plus, you should have plenty of words or scenes by then to constitute a sizable reward.
Still having trouble keeping yourself honest? Start publishing snippets. Each week or each month, take a slice of what you're writing and post it online. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell that guy on the bus who spends all morning staring at his iPad. If you start missing deadlines, they're bound to notice. In addition, you get piecemeal critique on your style as you go without having to give away the root story behind it all.
When it comes to keeping track of it all (especially if you choose the monthly-deadline route), make a drop-box for yourself. Instead of one giant Word document, break each scene or snippet into its own file. Create a folder for each month of your project, and store each scene in the appropriate spot. At the end of the month, gather up all the scenes you've put together and you'll have an easy time tallying what you've got. That way you don't risk giving yourself credit for last month's big dialogue twice.
Treat your writing deadlines as a chore, like taking out the trash or changing your oil. Well, maybe not changing your oil. Writing should not be the sort of thing you can ignore for six months and then pay someone in a jumpsuit to do for you. Instead, think of it like watering plants. You have to water plants regularly or they'll die. It's a bad idea to ignore them for months and then drown them in a day. A little at a time is all you need to watch them slowly grow into something beautiful.
...which I suppose makes copy-editing a little like bonsai maintenance, but that's a topic for another time.
Set your goals, then mark them off your to-dos like anything else. Put them in a rotation with your other chores. Reward yourself if you're looking for motivation, but never give yourself more pay-off than pay-in. Make yourself responsible to others and drink in the added benefits.
But most of all, get to work on time.
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