1. Don’t stress about style or content on your first draft, just start writing it will never be perfect but if you don’t start you will never finish.
2. Write as the real you; don’t forget Oscar Wilde’s advice that you may as well be yourself as everyone else has been taken.
3. Write to a title: it functions as a first point of focus.
4. Ask someone you don’t know well to give you honest feedback on a specific aspect of your writing.
5. Write wherever and whenever you have a moment
(I write in hairdressers, on train, on plane, in bed… if you really want this you will make time.)
6. Set targets and deadlines and don’t ever, ever break them.
Jo Haigh is the author of the FT Guide to Finance for Non Financial Managers: The Numbers Game and How to Win It.
More about Jo.