How I saved my book after 5 months procrastination

Photo by Usman Yousaf on Unsplash

The dreaded Writer’s Block. It possesses many forms: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of what critics will say, or your family, uncertainty about what comes next…

But wait. This post isn’t a treatise on writer’s block per se. Many folks have written brilliant advice on this topic. No, I’m going to explain the technique I learned from Romance authors — the most prolific writers on the planet — that I used to save my latest novel.

“A third of the way into the book, whammo! I got stuck. Bad.”

You’d think after seven published books I’d be immune to writer’s block, but I don’t think any writer is. You might avoid it for years, and then it strikes unexpectedly. I’ve had “stuck” moments on every book and always got through them by perseverance and rewriting. In a couple of cases, I’ve realized my head isn’t in my current book, so I put it aside, wrote something else, and came back to it. But I couldn’t do that with my latest book.

One of my most successful novels ended with a trilogy in mind, though it could easily act as a standalone. Which it did for many years. But my readers keep demanding the sequel, and I too longed to return to those familiar characters. So, in 2020, I started on book two of three, intending to write them back-to-back. A third of the way into the book…