It can feel sometimes like a whole novel is impossible to wrap your mind around. All those scenes, all those characters, every bit of plot leading up to that single important climax. And then the idea of making it perfect, ready to sell—impossible, right?
Well, you need to learn to think in small chunks. You’re not writing a whole book today. Today, right this moment, you’re just going to write a scene, just a bit of dialogue between two characters. Or you’re just going to write about what this room looks like, or what time of year it is, or how the snow looks on the mountains. You’re just going to do some quick worldbuilding to explain why this world works the way it does.
If it helps you, you may consider getting yourself a star rewards chart so that your brain can see you making progress day by day toward the goal. It may help you to divide the work up into segments, like 5 pages, and then do the math to see how many days it takes to get to the end of the book and then put a chart up from beginning to end of the work, and daily make progress toward the end goal.
Writing a novel is big, sometimes too big to wrap your mind around. But it’s not never-ending. You will finish the book. Well, you will if you keep working on it. If you keep procrastinating working on it because it feels too big, then your brain’s prediction that you will never finish will cause its prediction to come true. But really, it’s just getting up in the morning, putting on your pants. Thirty minutes a day over a year will produce a book. If you keep doing it every day. This is how you do big things.