5 Reasons You’re Experiencing Writer’s Block

Lots of writers discard projects at this stage, often lamenting that they just lost the juice they needed to keep going. They chalk it up to choosing the wrong project, the wrong genre, the wrong topic, the wrong characters, or whatever. That may be the case, but if feeling bored about a third of the way in becomes a pattern, it’s likely more about you than about the story, characters, or subject matter.

Remember, your writing brain looks for and responds to patterns, so be careful that you don’t make succumbing to boredom or surrendering projects without a fight into a habit. Do your best to work through the reasons you got stalled and to finish what you started. This will lay down a neuronal pathway that your writing brain will merrily travel along in future work.

If you’ve lost steam and fear it’s because you’ve chosen the wrong subject, take a day or two to do, read, or think about something else. Before you go back to the manuscript, ask yourself these three probing questions to reveal the real reason you chose this topic, these characters, this storyline, this theme, and so on:

• What drove me to write about this in the first place?
• Why did I feel that this was worth a year of my time?
• What is it that I wanted the world to know?

If your reasons remain solid, true, and important enough to you, you’ll likely spark a few “grass fires” into your neuronal forest, which will send you rushing to your desk to get words on paper.