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I think you have to practice the ancient martial art of BIC-FOK (butt in chair-fingers on keyboard).
As best as I can remember it took me ten or fifteen years to write the first draft of my first novel. I can't remember when in my twenties that I started, but I finished it about a week before my fortieth birthday.
What finally did it for me was not talent, not inspiration, but pure dogged perspiration. On my 39th birthday I decided that I was going to finish a novel before I was forty; I also decided that I was going to write every day. I didn't give myself any other strictures than that. No minimum, no maximum. There were days I wrote only one word; there were other days I wrote three thousand.
It all boils down to one thing: a writer writes.
If you can put your butt in the chair and get something, anything, knocked out you can see where you went right and where you went wrong. Then use that knowledge to inform your future decisions.
Some have to outline, others can't. But every writer writes.
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