How I Finally Obliterated My Three-Year Writer’s Block
Racing down the highway of creativity with no more obstacles on the road.
--
Between 2013 and 2016 I published over a million words of fiction and wrote over thirty books. I received fan mail, garnered hundreds of five-star ratings and dozens of glowing reviews. I earned some money and was having a ball as a writer.
Then it all came crashing down.
The reasons for this were complex and involved. Part of it was that, despite my high wordage and good reviews, I felt like a failure as a writer. After writing so many books I really did expect to be living in a mansion in Malibu. Silly me.
Suddenly writing became hard. I mean, it became excruciatingly hard.
Not all the reviews were good, of course. There were plenty of bad ones, too. Those bad reviews ate away at me, some more than others.
And there were other reasons things got worse with my writing, too many to name here. But all that matters is this: Suddenly writing became hard. I mean, it became excruciatingly hard.
I started writing short stories in an effort to get my groove on as a writer again. Stephen King says in On Writing that that’s the way to do it — get some stories written, get them published. That’s how you make it big.
I really did need to make it big, so I took his advice.
But writing those short stories was exceedingly difficult. It would take me a month to churn out something decent. I was spending more time researching than writing. I would dig myself into a rabbit hole of facts that I couldn’t get out of.
Gone was the joy, the flippancy, the sense of confidence at the keyboard.
What I was writing wasn’t crap, you understand. Many of those short stories received very positive feedback from magazines. Two of them were even published, at professional rates.
But they were an agony to write.
Gone was the joy, the flippancy, the sense of confidence at the keyboard.
