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Carry a notebook with you wherever you go and capture the ideas that pop into your head at the time they appear. Few people can afford to be novelists-in-residence without some income source earned by fair means or foul. Unless you're Alain de Botton, who writes living off an inheritance (although now his writing makes the money too), you'd best make the time wherever it's free. Use your time on the bus to and from work, during lunch, after dinner, on the weekends, during vacation blocks. Asking for time off work to write a bestseller should be done with care. Judge the nature of your workplace firstthe more conservative the establishment, the less likely this will be something considered worth their loss of your time. Bestsellers do not need to be the best written; some may well be, but it can also take many years before the public catches up with such genius unless you also manage to win a literary prize. If you want to be great now, just start typing or writing, get it down and then fiddle with it later. Procrastination and perfection are the enemies of the bestseller. A plan, an outline, whatever you will. You can mind map it if you prefer. There are lots of rules for doing this. You can even read those too if you like. Or you can just get stuck into it and write, write, write. Not everyone does this the color-by-numbers way, so find your own path. Fiction: Set out the characters, their traits and quirks, their motivations. This should be fun; fill them out as they grow in your mind. If they're based on your neighbor or ex-lover, make sure they're unrecognizable unless you enjoy being sued. And write out the situations you want to develop in your book, the plot so to speak, the series of events, be they fortunate or not so fortunate. And how will this all end? A cliffhanger, a surprise, a happy ending or a kaboom and everyone dies? Non-fiction: Consider the need for sections, methods, partshow will you break things down? Chapters can be nested inside sections, etc. Say you're writing about people's love of apple pies. Section one could cover what the apple pie is, with stories of people waxing nostalgic about apple pies from years gone by. Section two is where to source the best apples for pie making. Section three is a stack of apple pie recipes. Section four is troubleshooting failed apple pies. Section five is photos of your favorite apple pies off Instagram. And so forth... Some topics, like cats and beer, people will never get enough of and all you need to do is have a modern, current angle. Other things that are way too cliched, like celebrities and pop music, and you'll need funky new ways of bringing such over-written topics to people's attention that they don't already know. Is the writing taking you where you want it to? Is it good, interesting, fathomable, fascinating, gripping, useful, entertaining, sparkling, witty, trendy, or whatever combination of such things you're trying to make it? Don't be afraid of splitting elements off for other projects. Sometimes you are mid-stream writing about one thing and another insists on birthing itself. Write it down, label it and put it aside for your next project. Avoid trying to add too much to the one piece you're writing now. After all, should you manage the bestseller, you'll need to produce more after and these side ideas are perfect germs of new bestsellers for later. Miss it various times. Set more deadlines. Miss those too. After all, life has a habit of getting in the way. Eventually, set the uncrossable deadline and mean it. This time, finish the book. Enough already! There is a point at which you must choose between being an author-in-waiting and a published-author-hoping-for-a-bestseller. Decide and get on with the writing to completion. Be realistic. A book on the lost herd of rice carving gnus of outer Mongolia will likely take longer than a fiction piece about vampires destroying the local tea party. Especially if you need to budget the money and travel to outer Mongolia to verify the research. Deep research can take years; you can nudge your imagination quite a bit faster. Holes can be filled in later. That is what friendly reviewers and your not-so-friendly editors are for, pre-publication. Listen to them; they can see the trees you keep missing for being deep in the proverbial forest.
Take notes all the time. Find the time to write. Be focused on the purpose of this book. Write a synopsis of your book. Review progress frequently. Set a deadline.