Since I finished a book last week and am picking up another one I started on a couple months ago, I decided to share some thoughts.

Some of you might not have written a book before but are thinking about it or are busy on your first. And it’s terrifying and you’re biting your nails and thinking, “OMG, I have NO IDEA what I’m doing!” And you know what? Don’t let that feeling discourage you, because you will pretty much always feel that way when you start a new project. I’ve finished eleven books over the past eighteen years, and I’m starting my twelfth now, and I still have no idea how to write books.

Okay, that’s not exactly true. Obviously I’ve learned a lot and improved my skills and all, including my discipline and perseverance (I highly recommend getting some levels in those two, because they will be invaluable if you want to write novels). But novels are big and messy and complicated and there’s no magic step-by-step formula for figuring everything out. And the methods I use to figure out who my characters are and what they’re going to do in one book won’t work at all for another book, and I have to muddle through the confusion with no real map. In short, there’s nothing scarier than a blank page. It strikes terror in the hearts of millions.

The scary never goes away, and every time I start something new, I find myself going, “Uh, wait, how did I do this before? Was I possessed by wizards all those other times I made this happen, because I don’t even know how to get started, and obviously if I’d really done this so many times before, I’d know what I was doing by now.” I look at the book on the shelf with my name on it and think, “How exactly did that get there?”

I don’t remember who, but someone once said that you can’t learn to write books, you can only learn to write the book you’re working on. It’s so true.

Finishing a book is much less scary than starting one (or at least it’s scary in a different way), but it’s hard to get there. I think for every book I’ve written, there’ve been times when I thought I was really never going to finish. Some of them I *knew* I would finish, but there were still extreme moments (read: days, weeks, months) of doubt. Doubt that even if I finished it, it was going to be stupid. Doubt that the whole premise was stupid. There was a time when I was writing Renegade X, about 1/3 of the way through (that’s where I ALWAYS have my freak out–I’ve learned now to ignore any doubts I have at the 1/3 mark), where I started questioning everything. My scenes started to unravel until I was worrying that this book I was loving working on and writing in like mad was completely stupid. Too stupid to exist, really, and here I’d written so much of it and I should probably toss it all and start over on something new.

NO! Thankfully, I didn’t. And you can convince yourself that *any* book is too stupid to exist, or that no one will love it. Your brain will set traps for you while you’re writing. No matter how much fun you’re having, no matter how in love with your characters you are, some part of your brain is sitting there rubbing its hands together and going, “Now, what lies can I spread to sabotage this?” There is unfortunately no cure for this, but the good news is it can be treated with discipline and perseverance.

The more books you write, the more you learn to ignore the lies your brain tries to tell you. Doubts go with the territory, but you can learn to ignore them and keep going. And frankly, if writing wasn’t scary, it wouldn’t be exciting either.

I claimed I was going to do a post about writing today, but I had trouble deciding on a topic, so I procrastinated until now. And even now I’m still not sure what this post is about, but as I type this, some ideas are forming because, well, butt in chair, fingers on keyboard kind of puts you in the hot seat, and then you either get up and walk away, or you make the magic happen.

Which is writing–and being a writer–in a nutshell. (Probably a largish shell, like a walnut, with twisty spaces and maybe a few walnut crumbs inside.) It’s really easy to say, “Eh, well, I don’t know what happens in the next scene, so… Ooh, look, the kitchen needs cleaning and there’s yarn shopping I could be doing because several hundred skeins just isn’t enough!” And yeah, sometimes I sit down and I really don’t know what happens next and my brain just isn’t on the right track and I can’t find the right word thread to get me going on a scene. And I sit there until my eyes get blurry and there are STRESS chemicals raging in my chest and I have to stop and do something else for awhile. But I try not to let that be the norm, and I always try to come back to it as soon as I’m feeling better.

I guess you could call that writer’s block (or writer’s wrage), though I’m never sure what people mean by “writer’s block” because it could mean a couple of things, ranging from not knowing what scene comes next to not knowing what book to write next or even knowing what happens but the words for it are being elusive. So basically writer’s block could mean technical problems with the book, or it could mean a lack of enthusiasm from the writer.

And you know what?

I have these problems all the time.

I’ll tell you lack of enthusiasm is definitely the hardest to deal with, because the reasoning behind it is usually hard to diagnose. Fear and stress can dry up your creativity like nobody’s business. Or sometimes it turns out to be some kind of health problem like not having enough vitamin D or not getting enough exercise. And sure, if you know you’re having creative problems because you’re not getting enough exercise, then the answer is pretty straight forward. But sometimes you don’t know why you hate your book or why you love reading your book but hate working on it.

But the lack of enthusiasm problem can also come up because writers sometimes feel like they need “filler” scenes. And this can creep up on you, especially if you find yourself going, “AGH, I really don’t want to write this boring scene that I hate, but I NEED it for the story.” Forcing yourself to slog through scenes you don’t like can make you, you know, not want to work on them. And the truth is? No matter how much you think you *need* that boring filler scene, if it’s boring, then you don’t need it. It’s like saying you need ugly weeds in your garden so your flowers can feel extra pretty.

So cut it and figure out something else that can go there. Don’t waste your garden space on weeds, because you’re going to need all the flowers you can get. And if you really don’t want to cut it? Add something that makes you love it. If you’re like, “It’s really important that the scullery maid washes all these dishes in this scene because that’s how she cuts her hand and gets it infected and loses it later on, and we HAVE to see it happen, so it has to stay!” then add something to it that makes it cool. Like while the scullery maid is washing these boring old dishes, someone comes in and says, “Hey, the prince you’re not-so-secretly in love with is getting married to your worst enemy! Oops, didn’t mean to startle you and make you drop a dish and cut yourself on it.” Now this boring old scene has stuff that makes you squee inside and go, “OMG, I can’t wait for that to happen!” It could be anything, really, as long as it gives you that scene-crush feeling.

You should have a scene-crush on every scene! Isn’t that awesome? Isn’t it awesome and liberating and exciting that every single scene in the book should have something that makes you drool with anticipation? It can sound overwhelming at first, but it also means you have permission to have fun with every scene in your book. That doesn’t mean they’re all going to be easy to write, but it does mean you can look forward to them all.

And… this post is getting kind of long, and I’ve only addressed one type of writer’s block, so I will continue it in another post.