Writing is simply a number of sentences strung together. Remember the paper chains that you made as a child? One slip of paper rolled and wrapped around another until a chain was formed that stretched from one end of the room to the other. That’s how you write your book.

Create small, manageable writing goals. Start by just writing a single paragraph. That’s all. Just one simple paragraph. You can do that, right? If so, your first goal has just been accomplished!

As a writer, it’s easy to get swamped by the mountain of things to do before your book gets finished. Add to that the burden authors today must carry of promoting and marketing their books, and it is so easy to get discouraged.

There is a solution, however! It’s simply this: Create small goals that can be easily accomplished. A friend once shared with me her story on her experience of learning HTML coding for websites. She said in the beginning it seemed impossible. She looked at the code and it made as much sense as if it had been written by a Martian. How could she ever expect to write the code for a website?

But she was fascinated by the possibility and decided to try. She started learning back in the old days when computer code was basically written sentence by sentence on a black-and-white screen. The first code she wrote began from a tutorial from HTML Goodies. This was a site that broke down the impossible into the doable. Lesson one began by writing a single sentence and publishing it on the screen. The magic happened, she said, when “Hello, my name is . . .” appeared on the screen. She had done it: her first line of code! The barrier had been broken. If she could write one line of code, she could write two and then three. Eventually she designed a website with hundreds of pages that was awarded a USA TODAY badge and won national recognition by being published on the USA Today site.

Another friend shared about learning to play the piano as an adult. What seemed something that only “other” people could do, she found that by starting simply and practicing an hour every day she could learn to play as well. It took time. Perhaps the learning was harder as an adult but she started with playing a few notes, adding a few more and a few more until at the end she could play a whole song. One simple song became two and, before long, she was playing for others to enjoy.

So it is with writing. You may not believe that you can actually write an 80,000-word novel, but you can. If you can write one sentence you can write two. And if you add another sentence to that you can, if you keep at it, write enough sentences and chapters to create that book that you always dreamed about.

The biggest advice I can give to you as a new author is to create a game plan for writing. Set small, daily goals that may seem ridiculously small but which are doable. Keep it simple and the difficult becomes easy. Each sentence you write will become a link to the next one.

Finally, keep learning. Read books, study the writing of authors you enjoy. Become your own professor of “Authorology.” Take classes if you can, attend workshops online and offline. Read, study, and write your way to success.