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Life Happens. It’s not always “writer’s block.”

Writing and Life: Why They’re Inseparable for Authors

We can’t talk about being an author without talking about life.

You’re not a writer just between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., hammering out words before the kids wake up. Or between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., stealing time after your partner goes to bed.

You’re a writer 24/7.

Every moment of every day, you’re soaking in experiences, emotions, and observations, all of which might eventually fuel your stories. Writing doesn’t live in a box—it’s interwoven with life itself.

At FictionMentor.com, this philosophy has been a cornerstone since day one. Sure, there’s no shortage of books and courses out there focused on the craft of writing. Many are excellent, and I recommend them often. But here’s the problem: when we hyper-focus on craft, we risk divorcing writing from two essential aspects of the journey:

  1. The business of being an author.
  2. The life that fuels creativity.

This separation does a disservice to us as creators. Life is messy, chaotic, and unpredictable. And it’s that very chaos that fuels creativity. Trying to isolate your writing from the rest of your life—to protect it or keep it “pure”—is not only unrealistic, it’s counterproductive.

Writer’s Block vs. Life

I’ve often said that writer’s block is a myth. It’s our job to keep writing, to push through, to figure it out. But there’s an important distinction to make:

  • Writer’s block is when you’re stuck on what happens next in your story.
  • “I can’t do this right now” is when life gets in the way—temporarily or permanently.

These are two very different things.

I’ve seen this play out in my own life and in the lives of my author friends. One friend, who achieved incredible success with multiple bestselling books, hit a point where he just stopped writing.

Not because he didn’t have ideas. Not because he didn’t have the skill. But because he was done.

Writing wasn’t serving him anymore, and he stepped away. On one hand, it’s heartbreaking. On the other, if he’s happier and healthier now, then that’s good.

Another friend has been wrestling with a book in a genre that isn’t “hot” in the current market. She’s deeply frustrated with the process and the industry. Some days, she’s at peace with taking a step back. Other days, she’s overwhelmed by a sense of loss.

This isn’t writer’s block. This is life.

Writing and Life Balance for Authors

Accidents happen. Illnesses happen. Relationships shift. Jobs change. Life throws curveballs all the time. And sometimes, it makes writing feel impossible. When that happens, it’s okay to take a break.

If you find yourself questioning not just your writing but your worth as a human being because of setbacks, please step back. Seek help if you need it. Reassess. Take time to heal. Nothing is worth sacrificing your mental health or your safety—not even your art.

(“Tortured artist” is another bullshit myth that needs killing.)

The stories you want to tell are important, but you are more important. We need your voice, but we also need you to be healthy enough to share it.

The Stress of Passion

I spent 22 years in theater, 16 of those running my own companies. It was stressful—juggling rehearsals, budgets, ticket sales, marketing, and actor drama. We weren’t often getting paid, and we poured our own money into productions, praying each show would fund the next one.

Me, in “An Impending Rupture of the Belly” with Stray Cat Theatre in Phoenix.

But here’s the thing: I loved it.

That stress, while intense, was good stress. It was the kind of challenge you take on willingly because you love what you do.

Writing is the same. It can be stressful—agonizing over the craft, worrying about industry trends, or questioning your skill level—but most of the time, that stress is what fuels your passion.

But sometimes, that stress crosses a line into being unhealthy. When that happens, you need to recognize it and step back. Nothing—not deadlines, not the dream of publishing, not your own expectations—is worth your health.

Keep Writing… When You’re Ready

If you’re frustrated with a plot hole or stuck on a character arc, that’s the kind of “writer’s block” you can push through with time, effort, and maybe some brainstorming with fellow writers. That’s part of the process.

But if you’re feeling crushed by the weight of life, the industry, or your own expectations, take a break. Regroup. Come back when you’re ready.

We need your stories. But more importantly, we need you. Healthy, whole, and ready to share your unique voice with the world.

Remember: you’re not just a writer during your designated writing hours. You’re a writer all the time, living a life rich with experiences that fuel your creativity. So live your life. Let it be messy and beautiful and chaotic. And when you’re ready, bring it back to the page.

Let’s keep the conversation going. What’s your biggest struggle when it comes to balancing writing and life? Drop a comment or connect with me on social media—I’d love to hear from you.

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Battling Writer’s Block

Battling Writer’s Block

6 Tips and 1 Big Secret

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Before we address your writer’s block, we need to consider what kind of writer you are and what kind of writing you do.

More specifically, where do you want your career to go?

If you are currently at the hobbyist level, meaning you love writing for fun and have these characters you enjoy working with, that’s great. Maybe you make maps and character drawings and post them on your favorite website. But today, you’re stuck, and you’re looking up how to fight writer’s block.

Or are you are a writer who fully intends to get paid for your work? We have to address writer’s block from a differently if so.

Here’s the reality:

If you are someone who writes fiction to make money, you don’t get writer’s block.

You don’t have the luxury of writer’s block. Whether you are going the traditional route, the indie route, or hybrid, you’re doing it at a professional level in exchange for funds. You are a professional writer.

You may experience “project” block, as my friend Michael Stackpole says. You might be working on a project and get stuck for a moment.

The solution? Go to another project.

Most of my writer friends in the indie world have more than one project going at any one time. Maybe your urban fantasy isn’t working for you this morning, so you shift to your YA romance. For those in traditional publishing, if you’re doing a book a year, you still probably have more than one project going because you don’t know which one will sell.

In any case, you’re a professional. You are expected to craft fiction for your audience. There’s no time for writer’s block.

I recently wrote a 90,000-word novel in three months. The first month was for research and outlining. The other two months were for writing. Almost every day, I got up, looked at where I was, figured out what part of the story I was in, and dove in. I wrote 2,000 to 3,000 words a day.

And I followed an outline.

When you’ve crafted a really good outline, you don’t get writer’s block. You’ve already prevented it by spending the time up front to test your story.

You might get tired, which is different. Physical or personal setbacks are not writer’s block.

When under contract for that novel, I overwrote as much as I could. That way, I built in time for unforeseen events. I wrote as much as I could when I was in “the zone.”

I beat my deadline by a week.

Let’s talk about the more fun side: What if you’re working on something as a hobbyist, enthusiast, or apprentice? When you’re stuck, here’s what I recommend.

Get out of your space.

You probably have a space that you typically write in. If the routine isn’t working for you, you need somewhere new. Go to a library, a park, a coffee shop, or even a different room in your home. Change your visual and sensory perspective to kickstart your creativity.

Get to the good scene.

There’s no rule that says you have to write in order. Write what excites you the most. If you find some scenes you dread writing, maybe those scenes should not be in the story.

Engage with your favorite media.

Watching favorite movies, reading favorite books, listening to favorite music, or reading poetry can be really good for breaking up a solid logjam in writer’s block. But don’t mindless scroll online. Be deliberate in your engagement. Choose media that you truly love.

Your Voice was influenced by movies, by media, by songs, by other things that you’ve read. So invest back into those. Go read your favorite book. Take an hour, make your favorite food, sit in your comfy chair and get back into the thing that led you to today.

Other authors, other storytellers, guided you to today. Revisit them, hang out with them, read them, watch them.

Which is not the same thing as, “Well, Tom said take a couple hours…” and look at YouTube.

No, no, no, no.

Don’t go to YouTube. Don’t go to TikTok. Don’t go to any of these places. Don’t mindlessly scroll and call it work. That’s not work. You know it and I know it. I’m talking about the deliberate, intentional act of taking an hour or two hours to relax, get back in touch with your self, get back in touch with your heroes, your mentors, and then see how the scene progresses.

Go outside.

A ten-minute walk or just being outside can change your mindset. Engage with your surroundings deeply, using all your senses. Be safe, obviously. But get out. Get out and get moving. A ten minute walk. A 30 minute walk can change all kinds of things.

Put your phone away. Don’t put your earbuds in. Just walk as you’re walking.

Or if you can’t walk for any reason, be outside and just sit. But as you’re sitting or as you’re walking, notice and take note of the things around you. But dive deep! Don’t just look at the pretty flowers. Stop. Literally smell those roses. Smell the snapdragons. Touch them. What’s it feel like? What does it remind you of? Listen to everything.

If you break off a twig from a tree,  what does that sound like? What is the texture of that little stick that you just broke off? What does it smell like?

Get that stuff into your brain. Don’t worry about your book. Don’t worry about the scene. Just get those sensory things going. I’m confident that when you sit back down, you will find a new sort of freshness to the writing.

Write something else.

If you’re stuck, work on another project or take one of your characters and put them in a new, challenging situation. This can reveal new aspects of your characters and invigorate your creativity.

If you don’t have another project on on the back burner, take one of your characters from this current project and put them in a locked concrete room with some of their character, either one of yours or a character that you like from literature or movies

Lock them in this room and let them start talking to each other and just see what happens. One of my favorite stories about this, about breaking writer’s block, is I took a 17 year old girl who was an artist from my novel ZERO. I put her in a room with a 30 year old space pirate and locked them in a concrete bunker just to see what would happen.

You’re never going to read that scene, because it’s never going to be published . It was just a three-page thing that I wrote really quickly. But the dialogue revealed so much about both of those characters that there are still little elements of that scene in those two books. It’s weird, but it works. Just throw them in a room, see what happens.

Remember, if you’re a professional, you need to think about writer’s block differently. If you’re just a hobbyist, don’t worry about it too much. You’ll get there. But if you’re at the professional level or planning to be, your approach to getting through writer’s block will change because your livelihood depends on it.

I hope some of this is helpful. Leave me questions or comments. I’m just glad you’re here, and we’ll do this again soon. Take care.

If you found this article helpful, may I point you to STORYCRAFT. Ten hours of hanging out with two successful hybrid authors, talking about everything from story structure, to approaching agents and dealing with traditional contracts, to the highs and lows of indie pub. Check it out: https://tomleveen.store/b/storycraft

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Create Memorable Characters in Writing Fiction

If you want to create a memorable character, I need you to taste them.

Hold on. Stay with me. I promise this is going somewhere.

This is just a quick little exercise to round out or give some depth to your characters, to your protagonists.

Go to the beginning of the story. It doesn’t matter if it’s a short story or a novel or a series. If you’re working in a series, then start at the beginning of the series, page one of the series, and go all the way to the end of the series. Whether you’ve gotten that far or not doesn’t really matter.

Describe your protagonist in crippling detail in that first page.

Not for the writing, not for the novel. You’re not necessarily going to put it into the book. This is just for you. This is just an exercise. Take some time and describe that protagonist in excruciating detail.

I want you to taste them.

What would they taste like if you licked their cheek or their arm? Like what? What kind of sensations? Not just what they look like. Not her long, beautiful blonde hair. What does she actually smell like at the beginning of the story? Give as many sensory details as you possibly can. Dispassionately, no judgment. This is just for you.

Go in deep with all of your senses, as much sensory stuff as you can possibly squeeze into this description for page one, where they start the story.

Then, very simply, repeat this exercise for them on the last page of the story or the book or the series.

Now what do they taste like, now what do they smell like, now what do they sound like? And of course, what do they look like? Does she have a scar on her face now that she didn’t have before? Does he have a limp now that he didn’t have before? Whatever those things were, how are they different at the end?

Those things should be different because your character has been on a journey, and every successful story has to do with the character going on a journey, right?

Let’s say we’re writing a horror story, and some terrible things are going to happen on that camping trip. How does this character look, smell, taste, feel – all those things – at the beginning of this journey, in the car, on the way to the woods; do you smell the coffee? Versus the last page of a horror story: what do they look like now, what do they smell like?

I am not necessarily advocating for you to include all of these vivid descriptions in the story. You certainly can. They are there to be used, and that’s fine. But the purpose, the goal of this particular exercise isn’t just to create new and exciting ways to describe your character.

It’s to more concretely establish in your mind, as creator of this universe, the journey that your character has been on, having those kinds of sensory details in your mind that you can call upon. “I have to remember that at the end of this book, the end of the story, the end of this series, the target goal I’m aiming for here is somebody who is stronger (or somebody who is weaker), somebody who’s been through hell, but come out on the other side.”

How can you physically indicate what they’ve been through emotionally?

It’s just an exercise. It’s not necessarily something you want to put into the book, although once you have those sensory details, maybe it is something you want to put in the, maybe just in the process of doing this sort of exercise, you’ve discovered something about the character that you hadn’t thought of before. Discoveries are so much fun, especially for those of us who are pantsers rather than plotters.

Having those sort of concrete details can really root you as a creator and show us as the reader the journey that they have taken.

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Starting My New Writing Career: Writing A Book Is Not Enough

Here’s what I know.

I’m a good storyteller. I published nine traditional (“trad”) novels for a pretty good chunk of change. I got to write on a popular comic book. I’ve been writing in other universes, and get invited back. So I know how to do that part.

What I and most other authors are not so good at:

Marketing. Getting in front of people. Getting in front of the right people, the people who buy books.

Here’s what else I know:

I know that I’m really good at getting a group of people together to make something creative. A play, an audiobook, a short film. I’ve never had the same kind of success with these formats as I have with novels, but it also depends on what our definition of “success” is.

I have a very specific financial goal.

I also have a very specific emotional goal.

I no longer believe the two have to be exclusive.

The plan:

Write several serials at once. Failing and learning in public, per Gary Vee.

Use paid Facebook advertising to test headlines, images, and story ideas.

Use a social media scheduler to post no less than four times per day across the major platforms, with specific targets in mind for each platform (for me, Twitter/X only has good engagement on one type of post, so that’s what I’ll post. No more wasting time trying to drive traffic from a source that has a low time-ROI.)

Outline the serials to fill five or more complete novels.

Take the novels one at a time to Kickstarter.

Use book #1 in each series as a lead magnet and intro to the series.

Use newsletter swaps and paid newsletter advertising, as well as Facebook ads, to drive readers to the first book in the series.

Release for three months on Kindle Unlimited.

Then release wide, including my own storefront.

Once a book is wide and on my storefront, use that as the only link-in-bio…drive traffic first and foremost directly to my store.

…Repeat?

That’s basically it.

A lot of folks will say that’s too many irons in the fire at once. And I’d agree, except that this is how my brain works. I’ve tried all the other ways. Long gone are the days of a trad publisher offering me high five-figure advances, i.e., living wages.

If I don’t take charge now, I may never.

I’ve tried focusing on one thing at a time. I get excited by the new Shiny Thing and never go back. This way, I’ve got multiple projects that all hold my interest in varying degrees.

I get to tell the stories that have been cooking on back burners for so long.

This plan allows me to put to use many of my mentors’ ideas. For example, The Pumpkin Plan: Plant a shit-ton of seeds and prune the ones that don’t produce.

I don’t know which genre will land, but I’m not about to spend years writing a handful of novels, only to discover no one was interested. I’d rather spend one year or so writing a lot of different things, and then double down on the ones that bear fruit.

This also follows most of Gary Vee’s advice: post, post, post.

And by the way…

God help me….

It’s free.

I’ll have subscription options available for people who want more access and who want early access, yes. But otherwise, the stories will fundamentally be and stay free. My shit’s been pirated so much anyway, it’s not even worth the effort to whack every mole that pops its head up. So I may as well give it away.

I say all this with the enormous caveat that we are a two-income household, so I have a lot more room than most to manevuver. If I fail, our family won’t lose the house. This is not a process I’d recommend for someone who just stormed off the job with no safety net.

I think that’s it.

LFG.