Let’s get started working on these novellas/novels, shall we? If you haven’t worked your way through Step One yet, I strongly urge you to go back to my July 22^nd post and create a character profile for your main character (and if necessary, any important side characters who will play a prominent role in the story). If you don’t want to fill out the worksheet, that’s fine, but I think it’s a good idea, for a longer project like this, to map out who your character is and what his or her driving needs are before you get going on the story. 

In my opinion, it’s more important to start with these details than a mapped out idea of your plot or even a premise because the nature and emotional need(s) of your character will help the story come together organically. If you try to begin with a plot instead, you’ll end up trying to force your character to do or say things that might not be appropriate, and you’ll most likely end up with a stilted, contrived story with a character who feels very artificial to the reader.

So, once you’ve profiled your character and, most importantly, figured out what his or her perceived and actual needs are, you’re ready for Step Two: Writing the First Chapter. My chapter prompts are going to be much sparser than the sentence-by-sentence prompts from Hannah Tinti’s class because it would be far more difficult to work your way through a complete novella or novel one sentence at a time. Plus, I found that by about halfway through the week in Hannah Tinti’s class, I was going well beyond the requirements of the prompts. They were a nice starting point, but if I had actually held myself back to stick to them religiously, I wouldn’t have ended up with a draft as far along as I did.

So instead of the one sentence at a time approach, I’m creating minimalistic prompts that will allow you to go at your own pace and let the story guide you. The prompts offer overall guidelines for the chapter, and my hope is that each chapter prompt will be enough to get you going on the chapter and push you to keep going from one chapter to the next. However, if anyone does get stuck at any point, please feel free to leave a comment on the respective prompt you need help with. I’m happy to offer more detailed, specific prompts and requirements if it will help.

Okay, enough blabber. Here’s Step Two:

All Tracks, Step 2:

Write a chapter introducing your character in his/her world. This chapter will function as the set-up of the overall story arc.

Requirements:

1.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

2.      The chapter must introduce the setting.

a.      In the first three pages of the chapter, you must provide details from at least three of the five senses.

3.      The chapter must get across the following details:

a.       The character’s name.

b.      The character’s starting point (i.e. the character as he or she exists prior to the change or lack of change that will occur in the story).

c.       The character’s perceived need.

d.      The character’s actual need.

4.      The chapter must include a complete story arc:

a.       Set-up (2-3 pages)

b.      Inciting Incident (1-2 pages)

c.       Escalation (5-10 pages)

d.      Climax (1-2 pages)

e.       Resolution/Conclusive Lack of Resolution (1-2 pages)

5.      The story arc in this chapter should represent the typical ups and downs of this character’s life.

Okay, I know I still haven’t talked about my disappearance from the blogosphere and the reason for my sudden return. I will. I promise. Somebody emailed me months ago wanting to know why I had stopped blogging. I saved the email for weeks, trying to decide how to reply, what to say, how to explain it all, how to make sense of it myself, even—and then, finally, I deleted the email without responding. I’m sorry, whoever you are (if you’re even reading this). It wasn’t that I wanted to ignore you or that I felt it was none of your business. It was just that I wasn’t ready, yet, to talk about it all, I guess: the depression, and the depths it took me to this past couple of years.

And I guess I’m not ready still, beyond saying that I’m on a new antidepressant (a generic form of Lexapro) and am feeling a little better (though not back to 100%). The important thing, though, is that I’m writing again, and writing has always been my number one most reliable antidepressant.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. I have a proposition for you. Anybody want to write a novella (or, hey, why not a whole novel) with me? So here’s my thinking: I had such a great (and productive) time taking Hannah Tinti’s One Story online class this summer, I wanted to keep the creative juices flowing with some more project-specific prompts. After working my way through Tinti’s daily prompts, I ended the class with an (almost) complete draft of a new story. I’d like, next, to get a complete draft of a novel.

Who’s with me?

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m developing a series of novella-specific prompts intended to take us from character profile to finished draft over the course of—well, I don’t know yet how long it’s going to take. Six weeks? I do know the novella will be parceled up into six chapters: one chapter for the set-up, one for the inciting incident, two for the escalating events following the inciting incident, one for the climax, and one for the resolution (or conclusive lack thereof). I’m going to create a prompt for each chapter, and I’ll post the prompts on my blog, so anyone who wants to follow along with me can do so.

I’m going to actually create four separate tracks of prompt sets, because my goal is to write a full novel that will be comprised of four novellas interwoven together to create a larger story arc. Why do it that way? Because I want to write a novel, but right now, the idea of actually writing 300 pages or so of one story feels overwhelming. My novel involves four key characters, though, so I thought, hey, if I look at it as four stories, one following each character, four stories that, when woven together, will create something larger than the sum of its parts—well, that seems manageable. But I don’t want them all to feel like they’re following the same, I don’t know, template, so I’m going to create four separate sets of prompts for the novellas. I’ll post all four sets here, so you can do all four, or pick and choose as you see fit.

Still undecided? Here, why don’t you take a look at my step one? This is the pre-writing stage of all four tracks. Just give it a try, why don’t you? And if you do, I’d love to hear what you think. I’m open to tweaks or suggestions for this worksheet (and any of the prompts that will follow it), and of course, I’d love to hear how YOUR writing is going. Nothing motivates me more than swapping writing experiences with other writers and holding each other accountable.

 

All Tracks, Step 1:

Character Profile Worksheet:

Physical

Eye Color:

Hair Color/Length:

Body Shape/Size (i.e. skinny, muscular, chubby, etc.):

Defining Physical Characteristics (i.e. scars, freckles, etc.):

Physical Self-Image:

Personal

Interests/Hobbies:

 

Education Level:

 

             Major/Specialization:

Job:

 

Attitude (i.e. optimistic, cynical, etc.):

Emotional

Perceived Need(s):

 

Actual Need:

For day three, we focused on opening up the propelling event, as well as exploring the characters in a bit more detail and adding just a glimpse of backstory. I really struggled with the assignment for today. I’m way less happy with what I came up with today than I was the first two days, but I still feel good about the story overall. I think during revision, I’m going to have to really spend some serious time with how to propel the story forward, how to really set the events into motion and create a sense that something significant is about to happen, that something unavoidable is on its way.

I think, though, that my struggles today resulted from the fact that I really procrastinated getting to work today. I work best first thing in the morning, and my creativity seems to reduce dramatically throughout the day. I didn’t get going on the coursework for today until well into the afternoon, and it’s now almost 7:30 and I only just finished with my assignment. I have the feeling that if I revisit what I have so far first thing tomorrow, before I even get going on tomorrow’s class, I’ll discover that I have all kinds of ideas on how to pull it all together.

My dearest internet, it has been thirty fortnights since last I wrote you. I’m breaking my long silence, at last, and will be posting every day this week—EVERY DAY—about my progress in Hannah Tinti’s One Story short story online class. I’ll explain the reason for my disappearance in a later post, and the reason for my return, but first things first:

I decided to sign up for the One Story class because I have some big writing goals this summer—I want to have a solid draft of all the stories in a new collection before school starts back up again in August. But the first bit of the summer was taken up with two summer classes I was teaching—one a creative writing class (it was so much fun!) and one tech writing. That and buying a house, moving in, trying to figure out what was leaking in the shower and why the air conditioner didn’t seem to work. All that fun stuff. But all that’s finally behind me, and now I have a month and a half (give or take) to dedicate to my writing goals for the summer. This class just happened to coincide exactly with my readiness to get going. Plus, it’s cheap enough that I can afford it without feeling guilty but expensive enough ($75) that I’ll feel obligated to keep up with it for the entire week.

So I’m planning to blog every day after I’ve completed the coursework for that day. I don’t want to step on Tinti’s feet (or set-ups—if you’re taking the class, you’ll get that joke), so I’m not going to regurgitate her lessons and assignments in these posts. Instead, I’ll let you know what the class has gotten me working on and how well the class is helping me get my momentum back up as a writer, that sort of thing.

The first lesson was about structure. Tinti laid out for us five key elements of story structure, from the story’s opening to the climax and resolution. Nothing new, of course, but it’s good, in my opinion, to return to the basics from time to time. Her first assignment was to write a five-sentence story that dedicates one sentence to each of the five structural components from her lesson. She provided us a detailed prompt for each sentence (for example, a particular sentence must include at least one of the five senses and a reference to the setting, things like that), and informed us that these would be the stories we would be working with throughout the rest of the week.

My story came together pretty well, I think. To get past that initial shock of writer’s block when I began the prompt, I decided to write a story I had had the idea for a couple of years ago, back when my daughter, Amalie, was a tiny little thing. Amie used to cry for, like, hours and hours on end, and we’d read somewhere (probably online) that going for a drive can calm a colicky baby down. I remember one night we were frazzled and exhausted and we strapped her into her car seat and drove around until she fell asleep. As I sat in the back with Amie and held her hand, I thought about what a great setting for a story this would be—a couple, who I decided should be fighting, would have to keep their voices down for fear of waking their baby. It seemed like a great backdrop to explore the strangeness of becoming a parent, of being pushed to the limit, of watching your partner make mistakes, knowing you yourself were making mistakes, too, of trying to live with post-partum and wondering if you had made the right choice, having a baby.

I’d started to write the story when I first had the idea, but couldn’t get past the first few pages. I just couldn’t figure out what should actually happen in the darn thing—how to get past the initial premise, which was all I usually have (if even that, to be honest) when I sit down to start writing. Tinti’s sentence by sentence prompts helped the story organically find its form. What I have now is far from finished, of course. It’s five sentences long, for cripe’s sake. It’s just a skeleton of what could (and hopefully will) be. But I feel like the story has found a form, and it will be easier, working with this, to fill in the details and help it come to life.

 

I posted the draft in the discussion board. I don’t know what will happen—if anyone will read it there or give me feedback. There are over 300 people in this class, which makes it seem all the less likely that people will bother reading other people’s discussion board posts. Feels too overwhelming with that many people, and it’s hard to choose which posts to read and which to ignore. But either way, I feel great about what I’ve accomplished so far, and I’m pretty freakin’ pumped about seeing what Tinti will have for us tomorrow.

Last weekend I completely forgot to write a blog post because I was in Columbus doing a presentation for the annual Columbus State Community College Writers’ Conference. I had intended to post about the topic I covered in my presentation, so I’ll talk about it this week. My presentation was titled, “Then What Happens?: Getting Unstuck in Fiction Plotting,” and it was about how to blast through that specific kind of writer’s block that occurs when we just can’t for the life of us figure out what should happen next in a story.

I provided 7 tips to help my fellow fiction writers get unstuck. These are all things that work for me when I face this problem, though no one technique works 100% of the time. At the heart, really, of each tip is the idea that it’s important not to get too caught up in getting your story to its conclusion. Let your story meander a bit; let your characters do things that might not seem to be directly related to the plot. Whatever doesn’t work can be revised out later, but you might find that you discover new, inventive, interesting plot points through letting the story run free for a bit.

Here are my 7 tips for getting unstuck in fiction plotting:

1. Use writing prompts. I’m a big time advocate for writing prompts. Damien and I keep a prompt bowl, which we add to anytime we can think of new prompts. When you just can’t figure out what should happen next (or when you want to write but can’t decide what to write about), a prompt can help point you in a new, unexpected direction.

2. Write a concrete, in the moment scene—have your character DO something, ANYTHING. Avoid writing a scene in which your character is simply thinking. One way to do this is to make a list of possible settings and a list of possible characters. Then have your main character interact with another character in a setting. What happens when he or she runs into So-and-So at X location? What will they talk about? What will happen? Something interesting and worthwhile might come of it, and even if the scene gets revised out of a later draft, writing a concrete scene like this might be just what you needed to break down that writer’s block.

3. Open a blank document to free yourself from the rest of the story, and place your character into a new scene. You might also remove yourself from the computer altogether and start writing a new scene with pen and paper (or if you’re already writing with pen and paper, try moving to a new notebook or start writing on the computer). This method will probably leave inconsistencies between this new scene and whatever you had already written in this story, but that’s okay. As with everything, these things can be fixed later through revision. In the meantime, separating yourself from what you’ve already written might help your mind to look at the story in a new way, and you might think of interesting things that should happen in the story that you wouldn’t have thought of when you were so attached to the entire story as a whole.

4. On the other hand, you could read through what you have so far and try to key in on elements that are already in the story but are not being fully explored. Maybe there are issues, characters, or objects that you’ve mentioned briefly with no intention of pursuing them in a more in-depth way. What would happen if you went ahead and pursued one? As an example, in my story, “This Is Not a Fairy Tale,” from Peter Never Came, in the drafting stage I just briefly mentioned that one of the characters, Stephen’s, hands were rough and dry. This detail ended up getting woven into the story pretty thoroughly, and in its final incarnation, the story relies very heavily on Stephen’s hands and how the other main character, Lucy, reacts to them.

5. Step away from the computer for a while. Go for a walk (but bring a pen and paper!), or listen to music. Watch a movie or read. Taking the pressure off of yourself to write might be all you need to overcome your writer’s block.

6. Combine two stories that you’re stuck on. Obviously, this is only useful if you’re stuck on two stories that have similarities. Personally, I tend to work on several stories at once, and I do often find that X story and Y story have similar main characters, or settings, or situations (or sometimes all three). Combining such stories can result in one, much more complex and interesting story.

7. Finally, if all you can come up with is a cliché, go ahead and write it anyway so you can move forward. During the revision process you can look for and rework clichés.

After a lengthy, miserable bout with depression, last month I finally went to my doctor and got a prescription for an anti-depressant. I’ve been feeling lousy for quite a while now; I couldn’t even tell you how long, months and months and months. At first I thought I was just having post-partum depression, but I just kept sinking and sinking until I finally reached a point, a couple months ago, where I realized that I had never been so depressed in my entire life and that, more important, I couldn’t bear the thought of living the rest of my life feeling that way.

I hesitated about going to the doctor, though, because I was afraid that nothing would work. Silly, right? I know it is, but I had this intense fear that I would get on medication after medication and just keep feeling the same, until I would finally have to accept that this is all there is for me, now, and that things will never get better. I had to force myself to schedule an appointment by reminding myself that my depression affects not just me but my husband and daughter, too. It’s one thing to choose to wallow in your own misery, but it isn’t fair to make other people wallow with you.

So here’s how I’d been feeling: empty, numb, uninterested in everything. I was eating a lot, but not because eating made me feel better. I suppose I had this idea that if I ate that candy bar or cookie, it might make me feel good, and then when it didn’t, I would eat another, thinking maybe the second time would be the charm. I wasn’t listening to much music. I wasn’t reading. I wasn’t writing. I watched things on Netflix, but with the exception of American Horror Story, which for whatever reason seemed to be the only thing that was able to really engage me during this dark period, I would just sort of sit and zone out to whatever I was watching, not really enjoying any of it.

Obviously, this was very distressing. It’s not like I’m normally little miss sunshine, but I’m usually able to focus on the things in life that I think make life worth living—good literature, good movies, good music, writing. Writing has been like an anti-depressant for me for many years. When everything else feels grim and pointless, I can always count on getting lost in my own creative process as I invent other realities, other people, other lives. In fact, I’ve found in the past that when I go more than a week or so without writing, I tend to start feeling listless and depressed.

But this time, my depression stopped my writing cold. I didn’t have any desire to do it, and when I would try to force myself, it didn’t feel good. Didn’t feel like anything.

It’s not even an issue, really, of productivity. It’s not because I envision myself as a writer, and when I don’t write, I don’t feel like myself (although that’s true), and it’s not because I have all these writing related goals, projects I want to complete, achievements I want to reach. The reason why it matters so much is because writing helps me deal with the world. Writing is my life vest, my buoy. When I’m not writing, I’m drowning.

So I got a prescription for sertraline and started the slow, anxious process of waiting to see if it would work. And you know what? It did, or at least, it’s started to. I don’t feel back to 100% yet. I’m still not writing or reading as much as I usually do, but I’m feeling better. Work doesn’t feel like such a burden anymore, and the little tedious “have to”’s of life don’t feel so all-encompassing. Life is beginning to feel manageable again, in other words, and I am starting to daydream again about my writing. I’ve been pacing around the house, with music playing, and thinking about the novel I’m working on. It’s a good feeling—feeling anything at all is good—and I’m so glad I finally took the step to do something about my depression.

This year, I spent some of my Christmas and birthday money on a pedometer to help me lose the weight I gained this holiday season. Heading into the winter, I just started feeling famished, all the time. I wanted to eat constantly, and I just decided to go with it. It would give me a goal to work towards in the new year. So I gained about five pounds—not the end of the world, by any means, but I need to lose it now or I’ll be very unhappy with myself.

So I shopped around and read customer reviews and picked out the pedometer that seemed right for me. I came close to spending quite a bit more for one with software that would track my progress and create nifty graphs on my computer. I love graphs. After reading a lot of negative reviews of the software, though, I opted for the cheaper pedometer and decided to create my own graph on the computer myself. This is better, anyway, because I was able to modify it to meet my own set of goals.

I created a graph with two bits of data: daily step count and sweat points from the Just Sweat mode of my Just Dance games (make fun of me all you want; I owe a lot of lost weight to dancing video games, and I just think they’re so freakin’ fun). The graph is really helping me stay motivated. It makes me feel so excited to watch those two lines go higher and higher up each day.

Okay, but what does this have to do with writing? I realized that my love of graphs, the exhilaration I feel entering each day’s data and watching  the line go up, might help me get more motivated to write. I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting motivated to write lately. A lot of that has to do with depression—maybe I’ll talk about that some other time—but part of it is just that I have no momentum going. If I can find something new enough to make me feel excited about writing, I might be able to get my momentum up to the point where I no longer need a trick or gimmick to get going.

I set a writing goal for the month of February: to write every day, no matter how much, no matter on what. I copied and modified my activity graph to create a writing graph. It also has two sets of data to keep track of: number of words written on my novel and number of words written on stories. The goal will be to make sure I have something to plot on at least one of those lines every single day.

I know the lines will go up and down. That’s just the way it works—some days you have a lot to say, others, not so much. That’s okay because I believe the lines will show a gradual progression upwards throughout the month, if for no other reason than because I so, so long to see those lines getting higher and higher.

So. Early in the month of June, I made a pact with myself that I would write every single day for the entire month. It is now June 17^th and I have stuck to it, and I don’t anticipate any trouble continuing on through the end of the month. Besides being invigorating because I’ve been more productive so far this month than I have in recent months—and there’s still two more weeks of productivity ahead of me—the write every day for the entire month scheme has reminded me of the truth behind one of the cardinal rules of writing: writers don’t wait for inspiration (or time, or whatever the excuse may be) to write; writers just sit down and get to it, whether they feel like it or not. Whether they’re inspired or not. Whether they feel they have time or not.

This point has been hammered home to me on the days in this past month when I really, really, REALLY didn’t feel like writing. Picture it: it’s 11 PM. Your baby is asleep beside you on the bed—because she can’t sleep if you’re not lying in bed next to her—and you’re tired. Or you really feel like reading. Or you just want to zone out to some Netflix. Or maybe, even, you have papers to grade or work to do on your Blackboard course for the summer.

But if you don’t write, you don’t get that little tick in your goal logsheet for today, and if you don’t get the little tick for today, you may as well give up because you didn’t meet your goal for the month. So you open up the file of the project you’re working on, and tell yourself if you only write for fifteen minutes, that’s okay. It still counts.

And you get to work. You reread the last page or so that you wrote yesterday. Then you force out a sentence. Then another. They’re awful and stilted, but you keep going anyway. You continue like this for a paragraph, maybe two. Each sentence takes forever to write, and you half wonder why you’re bothering since you’ll probably just delete them again tomorrow.

But then something miraculous happens. A sentence materializes in your mind, and it’s a good one. Just as you’re getting it out, another sentence follows. You start typing faster—they’re coming more quickly now. You begin to feel like you’re not writing at all, but transcribing something that someone else is reading to you. You go, go, go, go, go until the flow slows down, and trickles to a stop. You look at the clock. You look at your word count. You’ve accomplished something here. And to think, you almost didn’t bother.

The desire to meet my goal has kept me motivated to write every day, and the act of sitting down and writing clicks my brain into writer mode. No matter how uninspired I feel when I turn my computer on, if I sit in front of that computer and force myself to type, it doesn’t take long before the creative machine turns on and begins telling me what to write. It’s almost like the inspiration sometimes just needs to know you’re serious. “Oh. She really means it this time. She’s going to just go ahead and write whether I show up or not. Look at that crap she’s writing. I better get over there.”

This will be a short post. I’m in crunch time for the spring, with grades due very soon, so I’m only able to justify a very short break for my blog this week. I do, however, want to tell you about my writing month so far. Once I laid out my goals for summer writing projects (see last week’s post), I couldn’t wait for the quarter to finish to get going. So far in the month of June, I’ve written for at least a little bit every single day. Yes, I’m aware we’re only ten days in to June. Yes, I’m aware many writers write every day. For me, though, for the past several months, I’ve had a difficult time really getting into a consistent writing groove. Now, I finally feel like I’m working it out.

It started because on June 1^st, I had an idea for a story and wrote it right away (Damien watched Amalie). The next day I got back to work on my children’s book, the one that is number one in my summer projects list. The next day, I did more work on the children’s book. Somewhere around June 4^th or 5^th, I started to think I should just make a goal to write every single day in June, even if just for fifteen minutes. Once I’d made that decision (and once I’d become aware of the streak—albeit a not very impressive one—I was on), it started becoming a very important, conscious decision to write every day. If, at the end of the day, I realized I hadn’t written yet, I would stop whatever I was doing and write, even if I didn’t feel like it. The alternative was to break my streak and admit defeat for the entire month’s goal.  

So the month is a third of the way through and I’ve managed to write every single day so far. With each passing day, the stakes get a little higher. If I break the streak tomorrow, I will be breaking a ten day streak. If I break it the next day, I’ll be breaking an even longer one. It doesn’t really matter that the momentum effect hasn’t kicked in yet (it will, eventually, I know) because at this point, I’m doing it because I don’t want to have to face myself the next day if I don’t, and that in itself is proving sufficient motivation.

For the past month, I’ve been slowly warming my writing muscles back up again. I had tried to push myself with an insanely easy goal during winter break, and then I promptly gave up after repeatedly not meeting the goal during the very first week of break. For the month of January, then, which was also my first month teaching two classes since having the baby (though they’re both still online), I decided to just sit back and see what would happen. I obviously wasn’t ready yet to set goals. I did, however, have things I wanted to be working on, and not just in that “I really ought to be writing” sort of way; in that more magical, exciting way, where story ideas and sentences to accompany them dance through your head when you’re doing even the most mundane tasks: washing the dishes, taking a shower, rocking your baby to sleep.

So without even making any effort to push myself back into it, I opened the writing file on my computer and started sifting through my drafts. I was pleasantly surprised to remember that I did, in fact, write several drafts of new stories last year. I have the tendency to feel like I’ve hardly written at all since my book came out, but it isn’t really true. I haven’t revised many drafts to the point of being ready to send around, but I actually did write quite a lot of new stuff last year. 

So I got back to work revising a few of those drafts. I had Damien read a couple of them, and some other people read a third (which Damien had already read). I’m now hungrily revising—and maybe, just maybe almost ready to start sending out—the most promising of the new stories I wrote last year. There are still others that I’ll probably get around to tinkering with later, and a few that I moved to my “Failed Attempts” file (what a strangely good feeling it is sometimes to definitively say, “I will not waste any more time on this story.”).

Up next, I want to get working on a new idea I had recently that I think might develop into a novel. Maybe it’ll just be a novella. I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out. I do feel like I should be pushing myself to try working on longer pieces. I’m a bit hesitant about novel writing these days—my experience trying (and failing) to publish the novel I wrote as my MFA thesis left me both disappointed and feeling very shaky about my abilities as a novelist. I’ve read, then revised, then reread the damn thing who knows how many times. The fact that every time I read it, I think it’s publishable makes me wonder if the problem is, in fact, my own ability to recognize what a good novel should and should not be.  

I’ve had enough success publishing short stories that I sometimes wonder if I’m not just one of those writers—there are many, and many of them are very good—who just is and always will be a short story writer. Period. But sometimes I have these ideas, ideas that I don’t think could fit into the space of a short story. So even though I’m tentative and maybe a bit afraid, I’m going to start working on this new idea, and if it ends up developing into a full novel (gulp), well then. So be it.

I don’t know about you, but the majority of the feedback I ever receive as a writer comes in the form of rejections or acceptances. This is unfortunate, since, let’s be honest, for every one acceptance a writer might receive, he or she probably received several rejections for the same piece. The result is that the vast majority of the feedback we ever get comes in the form of rejections.

Of course, all rejections are not created equal. A personal rejection, complete with a note explaining why the piece was rejected or complimenting you on some specific aspects of the story feels almost as uplifting and encouraging as an acceptance. But of course, a stiff and reserved form rejection—especially the sort that doesn’t even encourage you to submit again!—can feel like a fierce, deliberate kick in the shins.

They say that rejections and acceptances are not evenly weighted. “It only takes one acceptance,” well-meaning friends will tell you, shrugging at you and then promptly changing the subject. This is true. One acceptance means a hell of a lot more than twenty rejections combined. The acceptance means the piece is going to actually get out there. The acceptance means, also, that someone, somewhere thought the piece was good enough to share with a readership. A rejection might mean the piece isn’t any good; it might mean the piece has potential but isn’t ready; it might mean nothing, though, nothing at all. It might just mean the issue was full when your piece came in and so the editor read your submission just looking for any reason, any reason at all, to reject it.

Even so, it can be discouraging when the feedback you receive on your writing is mostly negative. This problem is compounded if you’re like me: having published my first book—and won a contest for it, no less—I’ve had to deal with the reality that a book publication doesn’t mean anybody will actually buy or read the book. You’d think having a book out there might help tilt the feedback scale to the positive side, but if anything, the silence feels ever louder now.

Since resuming sending out my work after getting my book published (I had to take a break because all of my stories that were ready were now taken), I’ve received mostly form rejections. Okay, I’ve gotten one acceptance and a handful of personal rejections, but most of my responses have been a formal one or two sentences: “Thanks for your submission. Unfortunately . . .” A friend of mine was wondering if maybe I’ve been aiming too high since getting the book published, that maybe the book gave me an extra dose of confidence that caused me to submit to higher ranked, harder to get into journals. In fact, the opposite is true. I’ve been concerned with building up more of an online presence and have been mostly submitting to tiny online journals. I suppose that fact makes the rejections smart even more: these journals don’t even get that many submissions, and they’re sending me form rejections. Ouch!

So yeah, I’ve been feeling a bit discouraged as a writer lately. It’s frustrating to fall back down to a point where I mostly receive form rejections. The feedback ratio problem is, I think, probably the hardest thing about being a writer. It’s hard to put so much time and effort into a story, only to receive a series of indifferent responses, and it’s hard to motivate yourself to keep going when the majority of the feedback you receive is negative. But I guess it’s important to remember that all writers must go through this, even the best writers, even your favorite writers of all time. And we should all remember, too, that getting over this hump, that sticking to it and keeping going in the face of constant rejection, is what sets the people who will end up being successful apart from the other, would-be but won’t-be, failed writers.

Recent visits to my midwife have been forcing me to face the fact that my baby is probably going to be here early. I’m at the point now where this is no longer bad news, though it is equal parts exciting and scary (I swing back and forth between feeling wholly unprepared and just ready to get this part over with and begin the next chapter of my life). Currently, I’m dilated two and a half centimeters and am 90% effaced. My midwife described it to me as being about a quarter of the way through labor already, before my labor has even begun. She was concerned about these stats two weeks ago, when I was still five weeks away from my official due date, but now she says this is actually a pretty good place to be. The baby’s big and healthy and is in the correct position; she seems ready to come out, and my body is clearly ready. She would not be considered a preemie at this point, and there would be no real risks if she was born right now.

The knowledge that she could be here any day has kicked me into high gear in terms of preparing for her arrival. I’m suddenly very concerned about the state of her nursery, what we have left to get for her, and how we will cope with taking care of her as the fall gets into full swing (Damien’s teaching two classes and working as the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review; I’m only teaching one online class, but still, even that one class, I must admit, makes me nervous—I have no idea how busy a newborn baby is going to keep me or how difficult grading papers will be on little or no sleep :P).

I’ve felt distracted and sort of fuzzy in the head for the past few months, which has made it difficult to write. Now, I pretty much can’t think about anything but getting things ready for the baby. I’ve been making trips to various stores every day or two, suddenly feeling like I should pick up another pack of diapers and baby wipes, or thinking of some other pressing thing—a play mat, say—that I need to look at in person to think about which one we should eventually get. I’m also obsessed with spending a lot of floor time with my cat, Franny, who I’m determined will not feel neglected when the baby gets here.

The end result is that, though for a while there during the summer I felt like I got into a decent groove with my writing, I’ve pretty much lost it as a writer and don’t see any sign of it coming back any time soon. There is just too much else on my mind. I’ve been fighting and fighting this ever since I found out I was pregnant, but I think I’ve reached a point now where I’m sort of okay with it. I’m worried if I try to force something that clearly doesn’t want to come right now, I’ll end up doing more harm than good. If I allow myself to spiral into feelings of self-loathing and blame, I’ll begin to associate those negative feelings with the act of writing, and if I let myself spend too long questioning my abilities as a writer, whatever abilities I do have will likely retreat even further into their shell of insecurity.

But this doesn’t mean that I’m not still hoping to write. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not going to worry about it for the next few weeks. If I wake up one morning with words dancing in my head, you better believe I’m going to rush to my computer and get them down. But I’m not going to force myself to sit and stare at a blank screen, and I’m not going to let a bit of a dry spell make me feel like I’m a failure with no skill, like my first book was just a fluke and I’ll never, never, never be able to do it again.

In the meantime, blogging helps me to at least think through writing related issues, and I’m going to keep writing letters to my daughter, also, though they’re getting more and more expository and dull. I’ll keep writing them anyway, and later, I’ll try to revise them into something more interesting, something she might actually want to read.

On Friday as I was driving my husband, Damien, to work, the song “Guitar” by Cake came on my iPod. I’ve always liked the slow, rhythmic bitter-sweetness of the song, but I’ve never paid much attention to the lyrics before: “If I threw my guitar out the window, so far down, would I start to regret it, or would I smile and watch it slowly fall?” It always seemed borderline nonsensical to me—of course you shouldn’t throw your guitar out the window, John. It’s just a bit of silliness, I always thought. Just something strange to sing that matches the rhythm of the music.

I guess yesterday I was in just the right state of mind that I could listen to this song I’ve heard hundreds—who knows, maybe thousands—of times and suddenly be moved in a new way by the question posed by the very simple lyrics: if I gave up on my art, this thing I’ve been so devoted to for so long, would I miss it, or would it turn out that I’d actually be happier that way?

Those lyrics kept running through my head the rest of the day. They seemed to pinpoint a question I’d been carrying around deep inside for several months now, a question I didn’t even want to admit to myself I was seriously asking: what would happen if I just gave up on writing? What if I just decided, you know, I had a good run, got some good publications, even published a book. I’m done. “Would I,” as the lyrics wonder, “start to regret it, or would I smile” as everything I’ve worked so hard for falls away? Would giving up on being a writer be a sort of relief?

There’s that famous quote attributed to Lawrence Kasdan: “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.” Of course, when you’re in a good groove, when you’re really feeling it, writing doesn’t feel like homework at all. It feels like magic, like being part of something much bigger and more important than yourself. And it doesn’t feel like work at all because the words, they just come to you. You don’t know from where. Later, when you read them, you don’t feel like you could have written them. They’re too good. All you did was transcribe what some magical being must have been whispering in your ear.

But on the days where it doesn’t just come to you, it certainly does feel like homework, and “having homework every night for the rest of your life” by choice feels a bit insane, does it not? You could relax and watch a movie, or you could play a video game, take a nap. You could do whatever you want to do, but you choose to write, even when it feels pointless, even when it seems unlikely that anyone will ever read it, even when you yourself can tell as you’re writing it how terrible this particular draft is. You do it anyway. That’s what makes you a true writer, not your publication history, not your awards, not whether or not you have any loyal readers or whether anyone besides yourself even gets what you’re trying to do. What makes you a writer is the fact that you write. Period.

But the other truth is that you weren’t born a writer; nobody was. You became a writer by choice. You imposed this on yourself. And knowing that can make the question posed by the Cake song an extremely serious one during the times where writing does feel like work.

Sometimes I think I would be happier if I wasn’t a writer. Wouldn’t it be nice, I ask myself now and then, if I could just focus entirely on the baby and not have to worry about how much writing I got done today?  But the truth is, I think it’s too late for that now. I’ve come too far, put too much work into it to just give up. My answer to the question is complicated, because I think I would do both: I probably would “smile and watch it slowly fall,” but at the same time, I think I would also “regret it.” Not having the self-imposed pressure would be a relief, but I would feel lost, I’m sure, broken, like I’m just drifting, and those feelings would overpower the pleasure I would feel at taking my life back.

Either way, it’s interesting to fully recognize that writing tortures me as much as it eases my way. It lessens the pain of living, while creating its own new kind of agony. It frees me from the boundaries put upon me by my life, my times, my society, my own sense of identity, while building its own prison walls around me. Flimsy walls, from which I could easily escape.

But I don’t.

Sometimes, I think, we writers get spoiled by those times when the words seem to flow like water from a tap—just turn it on when you’re ready to write, and turn it off when you’re done for the day. We get spoiled by those extended periods when we have ample time, when our friends and loved ones seem uncommonly understanding, when life’s little stressors seem to have decided to give us a break for a while, when everything, in other words, seems to align just right so that we can write and write often and write well.

We appreciate those times for what they are, but still, we begin to grow used to them after a while. We become accustomed to sitting in front of the computer and turning on the words. We begin to think that maybe we’ve done our time, fought our battle and won it, and now the world will forever step aside and just let us be writers, at last.

But inevitably, the good times will dry up, and on will come the not so good. Something stressful will happen at work or at home or in our families, or worse, for no apparent reason, the tap will just stop flowing. Did we forget to pay the word bill this month? We turn it on, and it just sputters, then dies.

We have any number of ways of referring to these other times: writer’s block, being too busy, being uninspired. Whatever we call it and whatever brings it on, one thing remains fairly consistent each time: after a while, we begin to wonder if we’ve lost whatever it was we once had. We begin to wonder if we aren’t, after all, the writers we once believed ourselves to be.

But it’s that doubt, more than anything, that causes the real problem, I think. I don’t know that there’s anything wrong or evenly remotely unusual about your ability/time/energy/etc. to write sort of ebbing and flowing, sometimes unpredictably. I’ve heard so many successful writers say that sometimes they just need a break from writing, or sometimes they’re just too busy, and that’s okay. Life has to be lived. That’s where we get our material from to begin with.

But when we begin to obsess over whether or not we’ve lost “it,” that’s when the real damage can be done. If I’m questioning my own abilities as a writer, I begin to feel even more distracted, even more blocked, even less inspired. If a day goes by and I don’t write, I begin to think that I’m a failure, that I can’t reasonably call myself a writer. The next day, when I sit down to catch up, I feel frozen. Who do I think I’m fooling? I wonder. I can’t do this. I’m not a writer. And, like the self-fulfilling prophecy those words are, I suddenly can’t do it—I’m too busy thinking about the act of writing itself to actually write anything.

I’m beginning to think that the best thing a writer can do when he or she is going through a dry spell is to just relax and not get too caught up in what it all means or how to break free of it. Sometimes the attempt to shake the block just makes the block worse, oh so much worse. When I write well, when my writing is actually coming together in a satisfactory way, it’s always during a time when I feel confident about my own abilities. When I question my own abilities, my writing gets lousier and lousier, which perpetuates the questioning, and so on.

I’ve been caught in the chaos of a move the past few weeks and have hardly written at all in that time. But for once, when I felt myself begin to get sucked into that downward spiral, I pulled myself back again and reminded myself that I had perfectly good reasons to not be writing—I was busy and distracted (and six months pregnant, which meant I was also tired and swollen and distracted by baby plans, too)—and I refused to let myself even think that my lack of writing said anything about my abilities or future as a writer. So now that we’ve finally finished unpacking and putting away most of our stuff, I’ve been able once again to ease back into writing with little trouble. If I’d gotten too down on myself about not writing, I probably wouldn’t have bounced back so quickly.

I get so spoiled sometimes by the good times, I fail to see the bad times for what they are: a pause, a break, a necessary breather. Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes other things are just more important. But we need to try to remember that there is a difference between the would-be writer who has a million story ideas but never seems to get around to writing (or revising) at all and the genuine writer, who writes when he or she can, and doesn’t when he or she can’t. Just doesn’t. And that’s okay.

This new project I’ve been working on—writing letters to my unborn daughter in the style of an epistolary memoir—has, fortunately, fanned the embers of the dying fire that is my desire to write. Since starting this project, I’ve not only been devotedly working on these letters but have also recovered my interest in working on fiction—hurray!

But wait. Here’s where it starts to get tricky.

I’m still at least thirty-one flavors worth of excited about this letters to my daughter project—doing something so different like this is challenging and rewarding and exciting and . . . and . . .—but I also want to be working on a children’s book project, which I really, really, really want to finish (at least in draft form) by the time my baby is born. In addition, I’ve been starting to daydream again about that novel I was submerged in the second draft of a year ago when I got word my first book was being published, and I’ve been itching to get started on some new short stories on top of that.

And so this is about the point where I begin to feel overwhelmed.

When I was in my MFA program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I attended a craft talk by HarperTeen author J. T. Dutton. During the Q & A after her lecture, someone asked Dutton what advice she has for people struggling with writer’s block. She said that she believes often all writer’s block is is having too many ideas and not being able to settle on one and just get it done. I thought that was absolutely brilliant.

I feel, right now, at risk for developing that sort of block if I’m not careful. For several months I was on again off again blocked in that more frustrating, I-don’t-have-anything-to-say way. This new nonfiction project has successfully jarred that block open, but now the ideas feel like they’re just flooding in, and I’m starting to feel at risk of drowning.

Which of these projects should I be working on? And if I make up my mind to divide my time between some specific projects, what if I just can’t get one of the others out of my head? I know if I try to spread myself too thin, the block will come on full force again, and I’m still too fragile, I’m afraid, to be able to handle another extended period of block. I need to avoid it now before it pulls me down.

So it’s a tricky path I’m treading right now, but I guess the good news is that I see the obstacle in my way and hopefully still have time to maneuver around it. I need, though, to put together a plan to keep the block at bay. I think the best thing to do right now is probably to limit myself to no more than two projects, but the difficult decision is which two? Obviously, I should keep working on my letters, since those are what opened up my block to begin with. But beyond that, what other project is the right project to keep me motivated and keep me writing?

Maybe I should be working on some new stories, since I currently only have two stories in circulation. The value of working on stories, too, is that I can complete a first draft of a single story in a few days. If, at that point, I realize that I really need to be working on something else, I can. Well, here goes.

A few weeks ago I posted about how I’ve been struggling trying to catch my stride as a writer for the past several months. I received some excellent advice in the comments, which not only made me feel better (thank you! I really needed that!)  but also gave me some thoughts on what I might do to try to keep writing, even if I don’t feel, for whatever reason, that I can produce anything publishable right now.

So since then, I’ve been writing letters to my unborn daughter. It’s amazing how quickly this project opened me up and pulled me out of my slump. Since I started these letters two weeks ago, I’ve written 34 pages and still have plenty more to say. To give myself more practice writing a book length work (and so that it will be engaging enough that my daughter will actually want to read it!), I’m writing it in the style of an epistolary memoir and plan to revise it extensively after I finish a full draft. My goal is to have a complete draft done by the time my daughter is born in September.

This project has made me feel like a writer again, brimming with words I just have to get onto the page. I’ve once again recaptured that fantastic feeling of having my head half in a writing project throughout the day. Even when I’m not writing—I’ll be washing the dishes or doing laundry or lathering my hair in the shower—and some idea will come to me that I simply have to include: I should tell her about the time . . . I should talk to her about . . . I should share with her my experiences with . . .

I think part of the reason I’m so excited about this project is because it feels important. Anything else that I’ve tried to work on lately has raised the question, “What’s the point?” Because publishing a book was so anticlimactic. Because the novel I poured five years of my life into still languishes, unpublished, in a file on my computer. Because even the things I’ve published, hardly anyone will ever read. Because, now that I’m pregnant, I realize there are other things in life that are way more important than my career as a writer.

But this project feels, to me, like it matters. Once I started working on it, I was overcome with the feeling that my daughter has a right to know these things, that she needs to know these things. I want her to know me not just as her mom but as a human being, and I want her to know that she is not alone, that if she inherits my depression, my social anxiety, if she struggles with her feelings about religion, if she finds herself wondering why she doesn’t seem to belong anywhere, I want her to know that I understand, that I’ve been through it too, that I will do my best to help her along the way.

And so this project feels more important and meaningful to me than anything I ever wrote with the end goal of publication. And because this isn’t something I’m writing to publish, it’s very low stakes, which is probably another reason why it so easily opened that blocked writing passage in my mind. Maybe part of it, too, is that I’m doing something completely different from any type of writing I’ve ever seriously done—outside of a few assignments I’ve been given over the years, I’ve never attempted to write creative nonfiction—and perhaps just switching gears so completely knocked something loose in my mind. Whatever the reason, I’m writing again without having to force it, and it feels good. It feels damn good.

Lately I’ve been struggling with how much time I think a writer should spend actually writing and how much time I think it’s okay—necessary, even—to spend on other, writing related endeavors (like reading). Part of the reason I’ve been having such a hard time pinning down how I feel about the issue is because basically for the past year (almost), I’ve been having a very on-again/off-again relationship with my own writing. I’ve had a very eventful year; between the book and the baby news, I’ve been quite busy and distracted, and I’ve had a lot of trouble getting into any sort of comfortable writing groove.

I’ve read that what I’ve been experiencing is not uncommon: you get word of your first book deal (or sometimes, you finish—really finish—a large project), and you find you have no choice but to take a break; for whatever reason, your mind simply will not let you embark on another project without a breather. That all seems fine, except for the fact that I got word that my first book was going to be published almost a year ago. Even if you consider that most of last summer I was revising and editing the manuscript, it’s still been a good nine months since I’ve had all that behind me, and nine months seems like an awfully long break, to me.

Maybe, then, it’s the baby, more than the book, that’s been keeping my mind so occupied. Thinking about and planning for my new baby has certainly taken up a lot of my time, but let’s be honest, I have a lot of time right now. I’m only teaching one class. I could spend hours a day thinking about the little being growing inside of me and still find an hour or two in which to write.

No. The truth is, all excuses aside, I just haven’t been as interested in writing this past year. Something strange clicked over in me when I signed that book contract, and I know part of it is the disappointment of realizing how little a book deal really matters, and part of it is disillusionment at the anti-climax of publishing a book, but there’s something more, too, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Part of it, I think, is that I just haven’t had as much to say. I’ve been, if you want to know the truth, much more interested in reading these past few months. I’ve always been a reader, certainly, but for the past few months I feel like I’d rather read than do just about anything, but I can never quite decide if it’s okay for me to indulge. Obviously, writers need to read, but they should also write. Lately, I’m always very quick to pick up a book, less so to turn on my computer and put words to paper myself. The result is that when I’m reading, I feel guilty about it—I should be writing.

So I’m torn, you see, because I don’t know where the balance lies. I think reading is essential to writing, and part of me thinks, maybe it’s not so bad if, for a few months, I just really want to read. But then part of me thinks that’s just self-justification. Yes, reading is important, but it’s not like I was ever at risk for not reading enough. The risk is not writing enough. The risk is not producing.

But I don’t really know what the right answer is. Should I be putting more pressure on myself right now, or less? Should I accept that I need a break—though it scares me, though I’m terrified I’ve lost my abilities and may never get them back—or should I be forcing myself to rebuild my momentum? I don’t know. I just really don’t know.

The past two weeks as I’ve been on winter break, I’ve been busily developing a half-online introductory creative writing course for the college where I work. I’ve been spending a good eight hours a day working on the course for the majority of the break, and it has, unfortunately, eaten into my writing time, which I had been so excitedly waiting for as the fall quarter drew to a close. Still, developing the course has been an interesting and useful experience.

As I’ve been preparing lessons and activities to introduce students for the first time to the craft and process of creative writing, I’ve been revisiting the basics myself, which has actually been extremely helpful. I’ve been stressing the importance of revision and suggesting concrete revision methods (like retyping the entire draft or doing several small revisions, each focusing on one specific layer of the text). To help students understand the creative writing process, I’ve compiled quotes from various famous authors talking about how writing is a lot of work, how first drafts are usually terrible, and how writing is, as Ernest Hemingway put it, “a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

It isn’t exactly that I forgot these basic truths, but somewhere along the line I began holding myself to an impossibly high standard. I suppose it came from my image of my creative writing career as a ladder, which I’ve been slowly climbing up, one rung at a time. Now that I’ve signed my first book contract (my book, by the way, will be released on January 15^th—the countdown begins!), I’ve been feeling this immense amount of pressure to somehow move another rung up—the next step, I guess I’ve always assumed, would be to land an agent—but not only does that next rung up the ladder still seem hopelessly out of reach, I’m afraid that I won’t even be able to remain on the current rung for long.

The result has been that I’ve been seized with a sort of debilitating fear. Or perhaps that’s too strong. I was writing for about an hour a day during the fall quarter, and the only reason I’ve hardly been writing at all during the break is because I’ve been so busy with other things (this winter break, oddly enough, has kept me busier than I usually am when school is in session). Still, I’ve felt as though my writing life has been at a standstill, and whatever work I have accomplished since I signed that book contract almost six months ago has felt, well, for lack of a better word, bad. I’ve been feeling like a very bad writer, and I’ve been worrying, I may as well say it out loud (or I should say, type it out . . . inky?), that I will never be able to produce anything as good as the stories in this one book, my first, which would also, then, inevitably be my last.

But what I realized while preparing the online lessons is that most of my final drafts are being published in my book. Which means that right now, every time I sit down to work on a short story, I’m working on a fairly early draft. It all seems like bad writing to me—and it is—but so were the early drafts of every single one of the stories in Peter Never Came. It took a lot of time, hard work, and feedback from others to get them to the point they’re at now, and just because I have a published book out there now doesn’t mean that my first drafts are suddenly going to be perfect, or that the writing process is going to get any easier or less messy.

Most of the quotes I’ve come across from successful writers indicate that writing never becomes easy. Writers never reach a point where their first drafts are solid gold; writers never become skilled enough that they no longer need feedback, or that they no longer need to spend countless hours agonizing over each new draft.

Or, to put it far more concisely and eloquently, I’ll leave you with the words of Thomas Mann, in my favorite of the quotes I came across when preparing my lessons: “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

Once I got back on track with my writing habits (as far as I can tell, my block has officially been kicked—I hope I didn’t just jinx it by saying that!), I was able to write a few new stories, which I then revised and am ready to begin submitting. So, while I talked recently about how I’m going to cool it a bit with the goal setting, I think I am going to try to push myself to meet the 10 submissions a month goal that has become my standard over the past few years.  

I am not, however, going to put pressure on myself to meet any sort of daily time goal right now, nor am I going to push myself to pump out more stories at the moment. The stories that I wrote recently were not the stories I had decided to write. I have a list (as most writers do, I imagine) of story ideas. I had gone through my list and selected two stories to be my next two pieces. When I sat down to work on them, though, I really had to force it. If you were to look through the files on my computer today, you’d find about fifteen not-very-strong pages of each of these two new stories, and you’d also probably note that neither one of the stories seems to be heading in any worthwhile direction. Odd, because I’ve been dying to write these specific stories for some time now. I kept telling myself, “As soon as I have time . . .  I can’t wait until I have time . . .” Yet now that I do have time, these “great” ideas are just not gelling.

But don’t worry. If you were to look at the files on my computer today, you’d also find a couple of new stories that didn’t come from my idea list, and those stories I actually feel pretty good about. It seems that my brain, rather than allowing itself to be bullied to write the stories I wanted to write, decided that it would write the stories it was interested in. With both of these new stories, I was just minding my own business, living my life and not trying to write, when the words for a first line, and then a second, and then a third, just started bouncing around in my mind. I rushed to the computer to pour the words out, and then more came, then more, and by the end, I had a solid draft of a new story I hadn’t meant to write.

This is actually the way pretty much all of my best stories were written. Rarely do the ideas I jot down in the pocket notebook I carry around in my purse end up developing into anything very good. The really good stories are the ones that I write the second I have the idea—and to be honest, they often don’t even start as an idea; they start as a line, which, once I write it down, sparks another line, which sparks another. And pretty soon, I have a full story developing beneath my fingertips, a story I didn’t even know I had inside me.

I quite like my two new stories, and now that I have something to submit to journals, the pressure to be working on short stories is alleviated. I’m now freed up to get back to work on my new novel, which, I’m realizing now that I’m becoming once again immersed in it, is what I really want to be working on right now. No amount of telling myself that my previous novel is still unpublished, or that the best way to attract an agent to possibly sell that unpublished novel is probably to blanket the journal market with as many short stories as possible, is quelling my desire to put everything else aside and live, for a while, in the world of the new novel.

And so I’m going to stop fighting it. I’m not going to worry about writing short stories. If another story comes to me, like these recent two did, that’s great, but the two stories from my idea list that I was trying to force are going to have to remain unfinished for now. Right now I’ve got (to use a cliché) bigger fish to fry.

Last time I talked about my recent issues with writer’s block and how I came to understand, at least, what was causing the problem. This time I want to talk about some of the concrete things I did to help unblock myself.

1. Turned the publishing demon off for a while. I mentioned this last time, too, but the first and probably most important step I took to break free of my writer’s block was to stop setting submission goals for myself, as well as to stop worrying about the fact that I wanted to get some new stories out there. I decided, instead, to just start writing the way I used to write back before I ever started getting published: to just put an idea down on paper for the sake of seeing where it would go. Period.
2. Listened to music.  I’m a big, big, big music fan, and have probably spent thousands upon thousands of hours in my life just pacing back and forth in a room by myself listening to some CD or other. The older I get, though, the less time I seem to have for things like that, and I think my writing is suffering as a result. MANY of my ideas have come unexpectedly when I’m just listening to music and letting the song lead me deep into my imagination. In fact, most stories that I’ve written that have turned out any good have had their own, what I call, “soundtrack,” which consists of the music I was listening to as I was writing them (and which I imagined would make up the film soundtrack, if the story were made into a film). I’ve seen the idea of listening to music as a way of breaking from writer’s block before, and I often see it pointed out that you should listen to music without words. I say screw that. I get some of my best ideas from music lyrics, and I tend to be way more inspired by other writing  (like lyrics) than just sounds.
3. Paced. This goes along with step two, but I think it’s of equal importance to the listening to music part, so I thought I’d include it as its own step. Normally, when I clock in writing time, I count only the time I spend directly in front of the computer. I’ve decided that’s ridiculous (at least when I’m getting over a block, it is). Some of my most vivid ideas come to me as I’m pacing and working a story through in my head, or even just letting the sentences form themselves with each new step. I don’t know why, but stepping away from the computer and just pacing around the room opens my brain up like nothing else, and after fifteen minutes or so I usually end up rushing back to the computer with a new sentence pushing out of my brain.
4. Read fiction and watched movies. Again, this is nothing new that I’m coming up with, but reading the sort of thing I want to write and watching movies that tell the sort of story I want to tell are excellent ways of getting new ideas. (And before you ask me, isn’t that stealing?: I am not the writer who wrote X book or the filmmaker and cast and crew who made Y movie what it is. I am different, and I see the world in a slightly different way, so what I do with the idea will be completely different from what they did. The idea for my short story “The Number One,” for example, which was nominated for a Puschcart, came to me when I was watching Little Miss Sunshine. I wanted to write a story about that same theme—that people should not be concerned with being the number one—and yet my take on the theme ended up being completely different from the movie’s, and I don't imagine anyone would be able to figure out where I got the idea.)
5. Read articles/books/blogs on writing. One of the best ways to get inspired is by reading about other people who got inspired. Sure, it’s just the same thing over and over again. Writers go through the same sorts of struggles; our success stories are often very similar. But you know what? My fingers still itch to dance across the keyboard every time I read one of those success stories, or when I read about a writer talking about his process or how she came up with the idea for X story. When music isn’t doing it, and pacing isn’t doing it, and watching Little Miss Sunshine isn’t doing it, then flipping through the latest issue of Poets & Writers might be the answer (or reading other writers’ blogs).
6. Blogged. That’s right. Part of the reason I have a blog, my friends, is because writing about writing, working through my current issues and unprocessed thoughts here, helps to free me up to do the fiction writing that I really want to do. Often, when I sit down to write and I find the blank page instilling me with terror, I switch to my blog document and write something there, instead. The end result is usually that I’m good and inspired by the time I switch back to that blank document.

So there you have it. I certainly haven’t reinvented the wheel—none of this is in any way new—but these are the exact tricks that helped (are still helping?) me get over my most recent, lengthy span of block.