The Best & Worst Writing Year
In 2019, I had the worst writer’s block of my career, and in 2019, I went on the most joyous and productive writing bender of my career.
Looking back, it makes me a little lightheaded to think about how both those things can be true. I had to take a moment on this, the first day of finally-not-2019 to consider HOW I went from one to the other.
It took me longer than it should have to realize I had writer’s block, because I was still writing. Every day, I was writing and revising, working on three different projects. It’s just that everything I wrote, I threw out. I threw out seven openings to one book and six to another. I wrote four entirely different plots to a single book. Instead of feeling better after I’d written for the day, I felt worse. The harder I tried to be A Good Writer, the more what I wrote felt like garbage and the more I, correspondingly, felt like garbage.
Nothing I wrote felt true any more.
I tried to think back to the last time I’d felt good about what I wrote, and that it hadn’t ended up in the trash can, and realized it had been an entire year. Reader, I panicked.
If you look at the top of this website, there are three words. Two are my name, and they’re anchored by a single other word: author. Arguably, they’re all three the name of the thing that is me.
I could still write, don’t get me wrong. But I no longer loved writing. If I couldn’t write, who was I? If I didn’t love writing, could I love anything?
(Ice cream, as it turned out. I could still love ice cream. And my husband, but really, he’s got abs on his side and that’s hardly playing fair, is it?)
Writer’s block, I thought. Fine. This, I can handle. I was a Pitch Wars mentor and a book coach, after all. I had a whole blog *looks pointedly at this blog* full of writing advice. Before I was a book coach, I’d been a counselor and case manager. I had coping skills for miles, and yet I was failing to cope.
So I asked for help. I called my friends, um, a lot, and I got a book coach of my own: the brilliant Heather Demetrios of Pneuma Creative, who also happened to be a certified meditation teacher. I meditated, I journaled, I yoga’ed. I took time off, I took time on. I did every writing exercise under the sun. At first, nothing happened.
Slowly, over a period of months, I crawled back up to normal. I managed to finish a draft of my goddamn book. It took me a year. NaNoWriMo, I was not. And then, something else happened. I started writing fanfiction again.
Suddenly, it was like a faucet turned on and I embarked on what I now call The Great Writing Bender of 2019. I wrote two books faster than I’d ever written anything in my career: an 88,000 word romantic comedy original fiction in 5 weeks flat, and a 122,000 word fanfiction romantic drama in 7 weeks. The real kicker? I wrote them at the same time.
This was very different than crawling through the draft of a 70K YA for 52 long weeks. It felt different too: it felt joyous, and true. My words felt real again.
Before I wrote this blog post, I was talking it over with my husband, trying to sort out which of the many, many coping skills and exercises I did that finally helped me turn the corner from the worst writing year to the best.
He snorted and said, “Easy. Fanfiction reviews.”
And uh, I would like to say that it was more than that. But I’m not sure it was. The truth is, when I was having trouble writing, I was following my muse toward topics and situations I deeply cared about…and they were not being well received when I shared them with others. I never stopped trying, I never stopped writing, and I always tried to follow my own instincts. But the turning point only came for me when I found other people who were genuinely enthusiastic about my work and believed in me: first, a new CP, and then, my fanfiction reviewers, whose love and excitement for every new chapter kept me speeding forward until I was writing faster, more joyfully, and honestly BETTER than I ever had.
It seems silly now that I didn’t see it, because it says in every one of my books’ acknowledgments sections that the reason I have a writing career is because of my fanfiction reviewers. I wrote three entire novels before I ever made an attempt to get published. When I finally took the plunge, it was because the ebullient response of strangers in the Vampire Diaries fanfiction community made me believe my work was worth something. That somehow, in this insanely competitive world bursting with talented writers, I had the right to own a website with my name across the top, anchored with that single, gravitational word: author.
Strangely, in the years after that, I’ve always seen fanfiction as sort of a guilty pleasure: something self-indulgent that helped me through the beginner’s learning curve. Something that makes me purely happy, but that also takes time and energy away that I should spend on my original fiction writing career, and you know, maybe keeping my poor agent’s children fed.
Turns out, I was wrong about fanfiction being a guilty pleasure.
One of the things I discovered with my book coach this summer is that the commonly used phrase
“refilling the well” doesn’t mean rest or time away from writing, at least not for me. It means finding ways to spark curiosity and passion in yourself. The kind of sparks that, when handed to a writer, become a book.
Fanfiction brings me back to those sparks. The support of any kind of readers who love the same characters I love brings me back to those sparks. In two months, I designed five entirely new books from scratch (two I wrote, three at the outline/proposal stage). Me, who “doesn’t have that many book ideas”. I could do that because fanfiction brought me closer to the things that spark me, and I ended up with five entire books worth of sparks.
I have come to understand that anything that brings you joy isn’t a distraction from your creative work. It’s the sparks you weave into the beautiful living tapestry of a story. And if you’re too busy working so hard to weave that you forget to go get more sparks, you end up with nothing.
In 2020, stop working so hard. And go find what sparks you.
♥
Huge, wordless gratitude to Margaret Torres, Heather Demetrios, Gwynne Jackson, Katie Golding, Chris Holcomb, Naomi Davis, and the Veronica Mars fandom. You gave me back my soul this year, all of you.
[Photo credit to Unsplash and Pexels, Kelly Bozarth, Steve Johnson]
