Writing Is Hard — That’s Okay

Writers block is awful. Overcoming it is absurdly difficult. Identifying the source of the block seems impossible.

I first started writing in high school, super emo poetry and prose, I was the weird misfit with a dead parent, in a small town of in tact families. So I took out all my feelings on paper. I didn’t write stories, I didn’t have the attention span to work through 50,000+ words. In college I wrote more, mostly out of necessity as I was an English major, but also on LJ in RPGs, and on Xanga. Then I found fan fiction, and I delved in to the world of A03, I lived there, I wrote constantly, I wrote good fanfic, slash, and crack fic (intentionally badly written fiction). It still lives there, some unfinished, but many, many finished pieces. I wrote scholarly journal articles for fun. Then came grad school, I wrote more, mostly literary theory. That is until my final year where I decided to take on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), a challenge to write 50,000 words of fiction within the month of November, I had a newborn and was taking 5 classes, but I did it, and I won (winning requires nothing more than completing the 50,000 words). I had written my first novel, and after that they just kept coming. Granted none of them will probably ever see the light of day, because querying scares the daylights out of me. Then, then I stopped. I stopped writing everything.