There has always been one thing standing in the way of every person that wants to be a novelist: writing the damn novel. Any aspiring writer will tell you that they have endless false starts and half written novels clogging up their laptop. Scribbled notes in copybooks, ideas in their head they haven’t mustered the spirit to put on paper – often times the hardest part about being a writer is the writing. Writers can develop a complex after so many failed attempts. They start to think that they just don’t have what it takes. In reality, they just haven’t given themselves the best chance to succeed. Here are the best habits for all those chasing the two most elusive words in the English language: ‘The End.’

1. Write

Writing every day is a discipline that many people don’t have. It can be difficult to find the inspiration to get behind a keyboard. When you do bring yourself to write, you can struggle with finding a rhythm. Your sentence structure is clunky. You find yourself rewriting the same sentence over and over again. The best way to rid yourself of this is by writing every day. Even if you can only manage to write 100 words one day, make the time to do it.

2. Establish a Ritual

To help strengthen your writing habits, it’s a good idea to create a ritual out of it. Choose to write just after breakfast. Get a coffee mug that you only use when you’re working on the novel. Put on a certain music playlist (something without lyrics, preferably). Where do you write? Pick a place, free of distraction to designate your place to get work done. It can be difficult to write in the room where you typically watch TV or eat. Consider a local coffee shop, a place where you will be free of the million other little things you should be doing around the house.

3. Outline Your Novel

Outlining is tricky. Some writers love outlines. Some writers hate them. All writers need them. You don’t need an outline when you first start writing, but once you know where you you’re your story to go, put it down on paper. There are many different ways to outline your story. It is just a matter of finding the best way for you. A great practice is to break up your novel into acts. This way you can outline your story in sections. Mark the beginning of your story on the outline, then mark the end. If your story was a TV show with three seasons, what would happen in the first season finale? Make that the end point of your first act. Create as detailed an outline of your first act as you feel comfortable. Then, revisit the second and third act of your outline once you’ve written all of the first. Keep in mind that just because you put something in the outline, doesn’t mean it’s written in stone. Nearly all novels have diverted from the original outline in one way or another.

4. Get to Know Your Characters

If you’re writing something, then you presumably want someone to read it. You want your readers to be invested and care – you want them to love or hate your characters. Take the time to develop your characters before you write them into your story. You know that your protagonist is the charming, sarcastic anti-hero type. Why is he that way? Where did he grow up? What was his dad like? Has he ever loved before? Picture him going to the grocery store. What would he buy? How would he treat the cashier? If he found a wallet on the ground, would he keep it or turn it in? Maybe he pockets the cash and then turns it in.

4 ½. Smell Your Setting

One of the easiest ways to get taken out of your story is when suddenly a new element to the setting was introduced that they were not expecting.

It’s snowing? I pictured a warm summer day.

Whenever you introduce a new setting in your story, think of what it might smell like and work from there. Smell is the sense tied closest to memory, but also the last sense in mind when reading a book on the couch. A well described smell can teleport a reader from their bedroom to a dank, marshy swamp or an old rusty spaceship in an instant.

5. Don’t Edit

Writing and editing are two completely different things. They require a different mindset. Do not edit when you should be writing. It can be tempting to go back and tidy up some dialogue that you wrote the day before, but you should avoid it as best you can. The quickest way to disrupt your flow and your vision is to go back and chop up what you worked on mid project. Keep your head down and forge ahead. There will be moments where you don’t feel that your writing is at its best, but it is more important to get the words down than it is to get them down perfectly. There will be time for that later.

6. Cut to the Chase

If you’re not interested in writing about something, how can you expect your audience to be interested in reading about it? There will be times when you find that you’re writing a scene that in all reality is inconsequential to the story and whatever point you’re trying to make. Feel free to leave it all out of there. Is your protagonist having some profound thought on their drive home from work? Did they witness something on the road or learn something significant from a radio broadcast? If not, you should consider leaving it out. There are times when you get into a rhythm and you’re practically typing faster than you can think of the words. Take a beat, step back, and think about the importance of what you’re writing.

7. You’re Done! Now You Can Edit Your Novel

You did it! You sat down every day and banged on the keys until you finally wrote ‘happily ever after,’ or ‘they were never heard from again.’ Of course, that’s not it. While the hard part may be over, you still have a long road ahead. It’s time to rip your story apart. How do you write a good story? You write a bad story and make it better.

When you start to make edits to your story, the first thing you want to do is put it down. Close the laptop and leave it alone for a little while.  A few weeks? Months? That’s up to you, but the important thing is to put some space between you and your baby. You want to be able to look over your work with fresh and relatively new eyes. Once you’re ready to bust out the red pen, consider printing out your story – one sided and double spaced. You’ll feel accomplished holding the draft in your hands, but it’s also good to read it like someone would read a book. Try reading your story aloud. It’s easier to skip over misspellings or miss awkward sounding sentences when you read in your head. Don’t be afraid to run out of ink in that red pen. If you don’t have enough notes, you’re not a good editor. Once you’ve made your notes, go back and fix them. Print out the draft, and edit again.

Regardless of industry or number of employees, every business requires bookkeeping in some capacity. Larger businesses might employ one, two or even more full time bookkeepers, while smaller businesses may hire a part-timer to review the books once a month. No matter the business, it’s important that owners and managers understand that there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to bookkeeping.

While cost is always a dominant factor when choosing the bookkeeping process for a business, it is not the only one to consider – after all, businesses should not bank on a bargain when it comes to the person in charge of overseeing their finances. To better understand the different “types” of bookkeeping, here are three categories to consider:

1. Traditional bookkeeper

Whether your business is small or large, you’ll need to hire an experienced bookkeeper with a formal education and accreditations. Specifically, the bookkeeper should have substantial experience in business accounting, preferably in your particular industry. This way, you can rely on their previous learnings, which will allow for a shorter onboarding period.

It’s important to consider the role a bookkeeper will play in relation to your business’s Certified Public Accountant (CPA). Typically, bookkeepers are in charge of processing an organization’s financial transactions and documents, including purchases, receipts, sales and payments. Those transactions are recorded in a ledger or journal. In addition to the daily ledger, most businesses use software, (think QuickBooks or Sage), to keep track of entries, debits and credits. Keeping two separate recordings, one manual and one virtual, results in a trial balance with a final total of debits and credits that match. The ideal bookkeeper, particularly those who are certified, will classify and summarize financial information into financial reports, balance sheets, income statements and cash flow statements.

A CPA’s priority should be analyzing business processes and reporting, and providing advice to the business owner, especially for complex tax filing concerns. While a bookkeeper handles the businesses’ day-to-day transactions, the CPA will review and analyze the financials at specified times throughout the year. To ensure cohesion and integrity of the business’s finances, it is critical that the bookkeeper and CPA work as parts of a system.

2. Advanced bookkeeping technology

All businesses should implement some level of technology into the accounting workflow to lessen their financial and administrative burden. When considering advanced bookkeeping technologies, businesses must ensure that the technology works harmoniously across the board, while solving for particularly tedious tasks within the workflow.

For example, one of the more time-consuming, monotonous tasks in the average accounting workflow is data entry. From invoices to expense receipts, businesses are flooded with excessive yet necessary documents on a daily basis. For more streamlined and efficient data entry, businesses should employ expense tracking and management technology. Proper expense tracking ensures that employees are getting reimbursed for their expenses on the job while maximizing tax deductions and protecting the business in case of an audit.

To ensure the business’s expense management technology seamlessly plugs into their existing accounting workflow, owners and managers should be on the lookout for three features:

1. Mobile capture: Bulky scanners are office gadgets of the past. In today’s business world, mobile apps and software can turn your smartphone camera into a mobile scanner, allowing business owners and employees to simply snap a photo to extract data points, like totals, dates and vendor names, and import them into the proper location.

2. Integrate with advanced accounting software: Proper “locations” are often powerful accounting software, like QuickBooks or Sage. Through integration with the accounting software, the data entry process is not only streamlined, but ensures the correct information is being put into the correct data field.

3. Cloud Capabilities: In today’s increasingly-connected world, business owners and employees need access to their most important business documents at all times, so it’s important that their expense management systems are connected to the cloud. In addition to ease of access, the cloud promotes a collaborative work environment and allows coworkers to always be on the same page.

While most businesses use some combination of advanced technology and a traditional bookkeeper, those that are looking for a completely hands-off (and expensive) approach should consider a virtual bookkeeper.

3. Virtual bookkeeper

With the ubiquity of cloud technology and the popular practice of remote collaboration, some businesses are employing new virtual bookkeeping services. Virtual bookkeepers stand in as an entire outsourced accounting department for a business. With a team of bookkeepers, businesses have a unique system of checks and balances giving the owner peace of mind.  While they may lose the personal approach of a single bookkeeper, they can rely on availability and speed with multiple bookkeepers available at a moment’s notice.

When deciding what kind of bookkeeper will work best, it’s important for businesses to realize that advanced technology can supplement (or even replace) certain aspects of the bookkeeping workflow. While a full-time bookkeeper can certainly manage the entire process, businesses that implement certain software can eliminate tedious steps of the process, saving time and money. By allowing technology to solve for menial tasks, business owners may be able to move to a part-time bookkeeper or even take over the role themselves.

Each option comes with pros and cons, and it is determining the best fit for each individual business that is paramount.   Business owners and managers should keep their bookkeeping process current; both to the market and their businesses’ ever-changing requirements. There is always room for improvement, so constant evaluation and tweaking of workflows to ensure an efficient bookkeeping process, and ultimately, a better return on investment, should always be employed.

Bootstrapping is the process of finding funding from other sources like friends, family and other potential investors. As an entrepreneur receiving a check for thousands of dollars to help fund your business validates your idea and can motivate you to work harder in achieving your goals. While it seems like a good way to get funding for your business, it is not as easy as it sounds. Bootstrapping requires flexibility and hard work. Here are some things you need to think about first before bootstrapping your business.

The Right Partner

Having the right partner or co-founder can make your business run more smoothly. The right partner can make the bootstrapping process easier. Find somebody you can trust and who has skills that complement yours. If you’re a hardcore business man but not good in keeping the books or accounting, find a partner who can balance your books for your best chances of survival.

Fundraising is Not Business

A small business is usually composed of small staff and limited funds. As the co-founder, it is your job to find funding. However, bootstrapping can take you away from your business. This can be very risky especially if the business is still in its infancy. Your business can only grow when the team is spending time to grow it. But time is a fixed resource and without you there to help grow it, your business has less resource to grow the business, making fundraising a “costly” venture for you.

The worst part of fundraising all the time is that it makes you into a good fundraiser but worse CEO. Spending lots of time away from the business especially when you’re starting out can have a bad effect on it.

More Money, More Problems

According to many investors, they add value to your company. While this is true in some aspects, there are also investors that are “problem creators” and not problem solvers. Investors bring in money for the company and are great when you want to bounce off ideas but they do not actually run the business for you. In business, the person with the most information can make the best decisions and nobody is as well informed as you. Some founders are naïve in thinking that investors have the same goals as they do. This is wrong, because investors are in it to make money only. They don’t want to become a “world changing software” or become “the industry leader in garment manufacturer”. They want a return of investment with profit as soon as possible.

This is not to say that all investors think this way. All we’re saying is that their interests are not always aligned with your own.

Find A Mentor

Having guidance can help your business become successful. When you’re bootstrapping your business, it is also important to find investors who are willing to mentor you. A good investor/mentor wants you to succeed not only because they have money tied up to your business but also because they want to genuinely see you succeed. A mentor can help you make difficult decisions without being emotional while giving you financial guidance.

Money Does Not Solve Problems

Receiving a big check can seem like a lifesaver to many businesses especially small startups but it does not always solve problems. A common mistake among founders is thinking that if they had X amount then they will be able to do something.  More money in the bank gives you more options, but more often than not, it gives the business more ways to spend the money they shouldn’t be spending like offices or equipment they can’t afford. For small businesses and startups, bootstrapped money should be used as a tool to generate more money.

Gaining the attention of well-funded venture capitalists can be very flattering. First time entrepreneurs who have a difficult time finding capital through traditional sources can find bootstrapping attractive and it is a great way to start a business. However, entrepreneurs should not see it as a safety net that your investors provide. To make the most out of bootstrapping, you need to manage your business’ money as if it were your own because let’s face it, the business is your own.