Wronger’s Block: When My Draft Throws a Flag

Last week, one of my friends posted a cartoon to my timeline about writer’s block. I don’t know if he jinxed me, but it came at a time when I had pushed back from drafting the 11th book in The Admiral Inn series because I just wasn’t feeling it. I would sit down to write my quota—and I did—but the scenes were lifeless, boring, and each day fast became an exercise in diminishing returns.

Now, I don’t really know writer’s block. Maybe what happens to me would be named writer’s block by someone else but I always feel there’s something to do even if the words won’t come. I will outline, edit, research, whatever, to make my time productive if the muses are sleeping in. Sometimes, I grind through blocking, scene-building, and dialogue just to keep the project moving forward and that was where I got to last week. That’s migraine writing for you, and I’m grateful to old fuzzy brain for building the sets and setting transitions, but the words simply ran out one day. With my lengthy experience managing the talent, I just smiled and pushed back from the desk.

I would lose a lot more time, perhaps actually be blocked from writing, if I didn’t know what this work stoppage really meant. There is good news and there is bad news. The bad news? My muse knew the story structure had broken. The good news? It broke because of this one scene I hadn’t seen coming. I wrote it and went on—for chapters—but the words felt empty afterward. While off keeping my hands busy so I could let the tiny horses in my brain run wild, I kept reliving that scene until I realized the emotional center of the book rested right there. That’s when the dam broke.

What I knew when I walked away wasn’t that I had nothing to say or that I wasn’t “feeling it,” but rather the further from that scene my typing took me, the wronger the story became. And that’s eventually what had blocked me. The book wants to be the best book it can be. Trust it. Trust yourself.

It’s still wintery here in the Northwest and very much frozen but like the morning sun burning the ice off the trees, or the dawning of a missed opportunity inside your writing, spring is slipping in under the weather forecast, unstoppable, inevitable. Write on.