Writer's Block . . .

There are days when you’ll be working on a story, and it’s just to hard. You just want to stop. Or maybe you're like me, and you procrastinate by going on crazy cleaning sprees.

   Some will argue that writer's block doesn't exist. Others, spend hours trying to come up with a solution. But whether you call it writer's block or not, there will be days when you want to give up.

     Stop, breathe deeply, take a break, drink some water, go for a run, or some other not-related-to-writing activity, pray, and relax. It’s okay to put it away and come back at it tomorrow. I can’t count how many times I’ve gone to bed discouraged because I didn’t get done what I wanted to. But after a good nights sleep, prayer, and some non writing activities, when I came back, it went way better.

  You will have times where you’re stuck in a story and can’t think of anything else to write. When this happens to me, I write an explosion. This does NOT MEAN I HAVE TO BLOW SOMETHING UP!!!! What this means, is that I write something exciting. If I’m stuck with the family at the table talking, and it’s getting boring, and I don’t know what to do next, then I’ll pause the scene, and add some drama. Have the phone ring, have a body fall on the dinner table, have the barn blow up, have a cranky neighbor bang on their door, have someone smash their window. Do something exciting, to make your story move again. Every time my story slows down and I can’t think of anything to write, I dump some kind of an explosion into the story, to make it move again.

   When it comes down to it, you need to determine why you're stuck. Is the story just not working? Try telling it from a different point of view. When I started writing Ty Carson book two, (Traffic at Graveyard Bend) I wasn't telling the story from Ty's point of view, and the story seemed stuck. I started over from his point of view, and it worked.

   If you're stuck because you're bored with the story genre, read books and watch movies that take place in the same genre to get you excited about it again.

   If you're stuck because you're just burned out, take a break.

   If you're stuck because you keep getting caught up on all the mistakes, turn off your mental editor, and just put words on the paper. You can edit later.

  Honestly, half the cure to writer's block, is simply forcing yourself to write. Even if what you're writing will never end up in the final book, go ahead and make yourself write anyways. It will improve your writing and keep you going.

  And above all, remember to write hard, and PRAY harder.