My Journey with Writer’s Block
I'm getting vulnerable today and sharing my personal journey battling writer's block. I struggled with a nearly career-ending block for years, until I learned the tools I needed to overcome the block and avoid future blocks. It's my hope that, by knowing my experience with writer's block, you can better understand where I'm coming from and why I'm so passionate about helping writers creating joyful and fulfilling writing practices that are free of creative burnout and writer's block!
LISTEN NOW:
If you’re more of a reader, I’ve got you covered!
READ THE FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, my friends. I want to take today to go ahead and get quite vulnerable with you and let you know what my experience with writer's block has been so you know where I'm coming from and the work I've done to find these tools to avoid and overcome writer's block in the future. In order to do that, I need to give you a quick rundown of my writing life and my publishing life.
I am going to try to do this pretty briefly without a lot of details. We'll see how I do.
I published my first book just over ten years ago. I went ahead and self published it. I felt like it was a good fit for the self publishing market marketplace. I was working with a lot of indie authors at that point, and I was very comfortable with the process. So I decided to just go ahead and do it that way. I never queried it. I never tried to go traditional with it.
I enjoyed the process. I loved being an indie author. It was a lot of fun. But when the time came to publish my second novel, it seemed like it was a better fit for the traditional publishing marketplace, so I decided I was going to go ahead and query that novel.
I had been in the writing world for many, many years by that point. I would say I was writing seriously for probably seven years when it came time to query this novel. So I had heard all the stories. I knew how it was supposed to work.
If you've been in the writing world for any amount of time, especially if you're pursuing traditional publishing, you've probably heard the same story. And it goes a lot like this:
If you want to be traditionally published, you are going to write many books that don't make it. You're going to query several books over the course of several years before an agent will pick you up. And then with your agent, it will take you months or years and possibly again multiple books to find a publisher. When you sign with your publisher, you're gonna be waiting another two years before your book hits the shelves. You're in this for the long haul.
There's nothing inherently wrong about that story because that is the reality for many, many writers. Traditional publishing tends to move very slow and there are a lot of books out there and a lot of people trying for this. Landing in traditional publishing is this perfect marriage of having the right book find the right person at the right time.
It can take a very long time and it can be very disheartening and it can be very frustrating. This is the idea I had going into traditional publishing. But what happened for me in the very shortest way I can tell it is: six weeks from the time I sent my first query material, I had signed with an agent and signed with a publisher and had a movie option on the table. It was another eleven months before my book was released with a big five publisher.
There was very little rejection along the way. My agent, who is still my agent to this day many years later, was the first agent who ever saw my material. We sent it out to a select few editors. One of them picked it up. It was just very lightning fast.
It worked out very well. That book earned out its advance immediately and I am still getting royalties from it. Not at all the story I was prepared for. And while it is a wonderful, wonderful story, I hadn't prepared myself for that story. And so after that book came out, I struggled.
And at first, I chalked it up to having my second kid. I found out I was pregnant very shortly after we sold the book. It was a rough pregnancy; I was in a lot of pain. I had to edit during it, but I couldn't write anything new.
My author friends who are also mothers said, “You know what? Totally normal. I couldn't write when I was pregnant either. Just do your edits that you need to do for your publisher. Ride this out. It'll be fine.”
So I looked forward to that. I looked forward to the day where my son was born, my book was out, and I could get back to where I was and write again. Except that day didn't come. I tried and I tried and I tried.
I sent proposals to my agent, and she said, “This is not the book you want to follow with. You're not nailing it.” I tried to write books and failed. All the things that I had always done in the past were not working for me. If you listened to the first episode of this podcast, you know that the biggest myth about writer's block is that it does not exist, even though that is the refrain that we hear all the time.
I'm here to tell you that I was one of those people for a long time. I was in camp writer's block doesn't exist until I got writer's block for real. Not just, “I'm tired, I don't wanna write,” or, “my plot isn't working the way I want it to and so I'm procrastinating it.”
Like, true writer's block. None of my normal tricks were working. This lasted for two and a half years. Two and a half years of struggling to get anything on the page when I was trying to write a follow-up to a book that was actually successful. Now I'm not talking like wild blow you out of the water, mega bestseller, everyone knows my name success, but very successful for me, and it worked very easily for me.
And now here I was for the first time ever struggling to write, and it wasn't coming and wasn't coming. While it'd be nice to be able to say, “Well, one day it magically came back,” that's not exactly what happened. Though at the time, it did feel like that.
When I got the spark of an idea for what went on to become Make the Fireflies Dance, my book that released less than a year ago, I was like, “It's back"! I know this is the book I'm gonna be able to write. The writer's block has been lifted. It's amazing!”
That's what it felt like at the time. But that's not what happened. What happened instead is that I had to look back and recognize what went on in my brain, recognize the mental blocks I was throwing up—the imposter syndrome, the fear (not necessarily of failure, but of more success...or potentially failure).
You can fear two opposing things at the exact same time.
Fear is a weird thing in that you can fear two opposing things at the exact same time. You think that fearing one means you want the other, but that's not exactly how it works.
I couldn't put a name on any of these things while they were happening because I didn't have the tools to recognize them. I didn't have the tools to see the block coming on or to see the eventual burnout I was going to give myself by trying to force my way through the block instead of working with my brain to overcome it. I didn't have those tools at the time, and so my block lasted for years.
But I was able, during that time, to try a few new things and that led me to becoming a certified life coach and a certified confidence and mindset coach. And that gave me the tools to look back and see how to avoid and overcome those blocks, so now when I start having the same sort of feelings, I can recognize immediately that my brain is doing this and this is why.
Here are the things I can do to make sure that I don't fall into that block:
I can recognize that the story I'm telling myself that's stopping me from writing is not a true factual story, and I can tell a new one. I can reframe things to get myself back to the page and writing words again. It took me years to learn those tools, and I needed to go through that period of blockage to get to that place.
As much as I hated the time I was in it—I struggled so hard; I wanted so badly to have a follow-up for Someone Else’s Summer to come out. In the end, it was six years later, because my second book with the traditional marketplace followed a much more typical trajectory. It was sold in February 2021 and did not come out until May of 2023. That's more the story you hear all the time.
There was a huge gap between books, which isn't necessarily the greatest thing for building a career trajectory, but it is what happened and it's what got me to this place where have the tools to share with you all to help you avoid getting into that same place. So you can have an exciting, joy filled writing practice, one that helps you build your career and get your books out in the world without facing burnout, without struggling so hard. And I'm so excited to continue sharing those tools with you on this podcast.
That's my basic story.
If you want to hear more about how the whole traditional publishing thing happened, I have an older YouTube channel that I don't do anything with anymore for myriad reasons, but it's still there. You can watch my publishing journey with Someone Else’s Summer here.
It was a very fun, very exciting, very wild ride that I don't regret for a second, but that I wish I had prepared for so I was better able to cope with what happened after.
As expected, I did not do that as quickly as I wanted to, but there you have it, my journey with writer's block and what I went through and how I worked to create and find the tools to overcome it.
Until tomorrow, my friends, happy writing.