That Time I Had Writer’s Block

I have been a full-time, professionally employed technical writer for nineteen years.  I’ve written I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of words of documentation for industrial machinery during those years.  I’ve also contributed to multiple gun and knife magazines in the last two decades.  For all of that time I have written fiction, too, and seven years ago I began writing action novels for Harlequin Enterprises’ Gold Eagle.  As of this date I have written eighteen action novels that have seen international publication, not counting the ones I’ve ghost-written.   I have produced for payment no less than 1,380,000 words.  You read that correctly: one million, three-hundred eighty thousand words.

But I had never had writer’s block.

That is, I had never had writer’s block until the last 85,000 words of that nearly 1.4 million.  While writing my most recent action novel I discovered I was having a problem.  Where previously I could lock myself away, sugar myself up, deprive myself of sleep, and crank out novel after novel under tight deadlines while working on multiple projects, I found myself staring at my laptop screen for hours at a time… and producing nothing.  I would start a day full of energy, picturing the number of chapters I would produce.  By the end of the day I would realize I’d spent all day working and not managed to complete so much as a chapter.

I would e-mail my editor and tell her I was almost done.  I believed it, too; at similar stages in previous books I had been only days away from completion.  But time came and went and the book still wasn’t done.

I started to wonder what was wrong with me.  Was it my work ethic?  Was I losing my edge?  Had I run out of ideas?  Why was I having so much trouble?

Worse, because every good writer defines himself as a writer, I started to experience problems of identity.  If I couldn’t produce my work, what and who was I?  What was my value?  Couldn’t I just sit down and finish?  Think. THINK!  These self-damning critiques became a drumbeat in my head.  Why can’t you finish the book, Phil? What’s wrong with you?

And then one day the clouds parted, the mist evaporated, light shone at the end of the tunnel, a light bulb went off over my head, and I realized I was writing a sentence consisting only of hackneyed, timeworn phrases.

No, sorry, that wasn’t it.  No, what happened was that I had to sit down and finish plotting out the next novel on my contract.  Doing so forced me to think about story, not about workload. In other words, I had to actually make my brain work conceptually rather than mechanically.  I was concerned with the tale to be told, not with the pages to be filled.  That’s when I realized what had been happening over the last several months.

I’ve had writer’s block, I thought to myself.  That’s what it is. That’s why I’ve had so much trouble.

And just like that, it was gone.  Suddenly the book I had been struggling to finalize and proof started to come together more quickly in hours than it had in weeks.  I’m well on my way to finishing it now, and have made considerable progress on the next book as well.  Of course, all this work takes place while I produce other work — I work the equivalent of three full-time jobs, give or take — and therein lies the issue.

I had been so productive I stopped being productive altogether.

As we grow more experienced we also grow older.  I’ve lost the ability to pull the all-nighters I once used to do routinely when finishing a novel.  I just can’t manage it anymore.  My body is willing, but my brain rebels, and it is that traitorous, treacherous brain that runs the show. The more I work, the more I feel the strain on my thoughts, and over the last few months the cumulative toll of my workload finally beat me.

I’m a workaholic. My best friend is a workaholic. The people we tend to affiliate ourselves with professionally are all workaholics.  It’s a fact.  But even workaholics have limitations.  It is possible to be so productive that you burn yourself out and, if you don’t take the time to recognize the problem and deal with it, your brain will go on strike.  You’ll still be putting in the same hours; you’ll still be getting as little sleep; you’ll still feel as much stress… but you won’t actually get much done.

Therein lies the solution, at least in my case, to writer’s block. You’ve got to step back. You’ve got to think of the story first. You’ve got to set a workable schedule.  When you reach the burn-out stage, you have got to rest.  You don’t have a choice. A writer’s most developed muscle is his brain.  If you don’t treat your brain well, you’re going to break it. It’s the only one you’ve got.

I’ve set a more reasonable pace for myself accordingly.  The result is that I’ve been much happier and much more productive, which is what this profession is all about.