Writer Unblocked
For now, at least
Authors are often on the socials talking about writer’s block. I get why. It’s one of the most frustrating feelings in the world. You know from experience that the blockage will clear eventually, but until it does, you feel like there’s some mysterious force preventing you from moving forward.
A little backstory: I’m preparing to self-publish my novel, Badge In Here. The past couple of months I’ve been learning about LLC formation, cover design, final proofread, ISBN and copyright—mostly from professionals who have these areas of expertise. If all goes well, by the end of the summer, BIH will be my first published book.
But it’s not the first novel that I’ve written.
Recently, I pulled my abandoned manuscript out of the virtual drawer where I’d shelved it years ago. My plan was to revisit the story, edit it into good shape, and then publish it in a much shorter timeframe than BIH.
The first step was to read it through. Ouch. Bad scene structure. No time keeping. A muddled story arc. Two feelings kept surfacing:
#1: This manuscript is a mess (despair)
#2: I’m a better writer now (hope)
Based on feeling #1, I could have thrown the manuscript in the virtual trash can and started something completely fresh. But I was still enamored of the characters. Abandoning them to an insufficient plot seemed cruel. Based on feeling #2, I decided to keep the characters and come up with a new story. As I checked off the tasks involved in self-publishing my first book, I began, in earnest, to write my second.
I spent some time creating a scene list of the original manuscript. That exercise reinforced feeling #1. I plowed on, creating a loose outline for the new story, which made me feel like I had things under control. Of course, that’s when the block happened. New words didn’t want to arrive on my empty page. I struggled, doubted, backtracked, procrastinated. And suddenly, a couple of weeks later, for no reason that I could fathom, the story began to flow.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my novel while this flow state lasts.