Tag: aspiring authors

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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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How To Deal With the Frustrations of Writing

How do you deal with some of the frustrations that come with being a writer?

We suffer beneath many frustrations. There’s the frustration writers block. There’s the frustration of not having enough time to do the work we really want to do. Of course, the ultimate frustration is not having our work published, or perhaps worse: having a published book, but no one’s buying.

I’ve dealt with, and continue to deal with, all of these frustrations (and many others). After wrestling with these frustrations myself—in my own mind, on paper, wandering around the kitchen at 2 AM speaking into my phone—there is one solution that continues to come to mind. It is great and wonderful and terrible in its simplicity:

Keep writing.

I know. That’s probably the most . . . well, frustrating answer I could I have given to you or me. There are plenty of other actionable items we could add to this list: you could take courses, or spend money on Facebook ads for your book, for example. You can read books and articles like this one, and watch YouTube videos about any topic under the sun related to your frustrations as a writer. God knows I have.

But the one solution that I keep coming back to is that I must write.

Gary Vaynerchuk points out that if you really want success with the thing you love to do, design a process you love. There are no guarantees in any pursuit, whether that’s law, medicine, creative arts, financial work, you name it. So, you’d better come up with a process that you really enjoy. I really enjoy the process of writing novels. All of those frustrations I listed at the top of this article are still true—sometimes on a daily or even hourly basis all at once. But I still love the process of writing.

If you’ve gotten this far in this article, you probably do, too.

With no guarantee of financial or emotional success, how do you deal with all of those frustrations? You keep writing. You write because, as Stephen King points out, to not write is death. More than once in the last decade, I have considered quitting altogether. I have thought about going back to school, getting a graduate degree . . . “I’m just going to work full-time at a library or somewhere.” (That’s not a bad gig by the way.)

The problem is, the thought of never writing another word of fiction chills my heart. I already know that I may never ever publish with a New York publisher ever again. But in this day and age, there is no excuse not to write the things that we love and share them with the world. The internet has utterly and forever changed publishing. Find your audience, and you will be fine.

I am not trying to diminish the size or weight of those three frustrations, or the many other frustrations I didn’t even list. They are real. They hurt sometimes. They can cause distress. But if you are a writer, the only way forward is to keep writing. Perhaps we need to try a new genre, or a new format. Maybe it’s time to take a class in poetry, or essay writing, or creative nonfiction. I have taken these classes and gotten a lot out of them. More than once, they’ve reignited my desire to continue writing. I am also not dismissing all of those videos and courses I mentioned. They can be very powerful as motivators, or to inspire us to try something new and different.

Through it all, we must write. We must not just merely suffer anxiety, but rather be anxious to set forth to tell our stories.

If we cannot or will not do that, then the frustrations have won. Let’s not give them the satisfaction.

I say this at the end of most of my articles and posts about writing, but today, it takes on a slightly more serious meaning:

Keep. Writing.

I mean it.

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Review + Writer Takeaway: Midsommar

A young couple and their friends travel to Sweden to visit a rural mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat devolves into a violent and bizarre competition at the hands of adherents to an ancient belief system.

 

I watched director Ari Aster’s Hereditary about a year ago, and it still haunts me. Not everyone had my reaction, and that’s fine, but I’m telling you, that was one disturbing damn film. I say that in a good way.

 

So when Midsommar came out, I hesitated; I wasn’t sure I could handle another Aster outing. The film was released in the golden days of 2019, and I decided to watch at last during October 2020, because, what’s a little horror movie compared to reality, amiright?

 

And to be completely transparent, I have not yet seen it. Not all of it. I stopped about halfway because it was getting dark and my stomach was starting to revolt on me as the film gradually got creepier and more gory.

 

I saw enough of it, though, to issue one blistering critique that ruined the film long before it hit Peak Gore.

 

The script of and performances in Midsommar at the top of the show are hyper-realistic and empathetic. We’ve all been on one side or the other of the opening phone calls. Then sudden grief hits, and it hurts to watch, because we’ve been there, too. Aster knows real grief and trauma isn’t, ironically, “Hollywood.” It is real and discordant and no one is pretty when they cry, not really. At the start, the film does a great job of “talk about anything other than what we’re all thinking,” and is worth studying because it is so thoroughly human (or perhaps so thoroughly American?). The cinematography is fantastic too (or at least, has been fantastic up to half way…)

 

A New York Times review pooh-pooh’d the performance of Florence Pugh, who plays the lead as Dani, a twenty-something suffering from profound depression long before additional trauma crushes her spirit. The review reduces her to a “walking wound” after the terrible tragedy in her family that opens the film. I see the reviewer’s criticism, but disagree—as someone who struggles with depression and PTSD, I felt the depiction was spot-on.

 

So far so good, eh? Wait for it.

 

At about the hour mark, not even half way into the film, things get dark and gruesome. It was appalling and shocking and effective, all the things a sequence like that should be in a horror movie.

 

But the aftermath of this event, which gruesomely kills two people, consists of two of the male leads getting into an argument over their . . . dissertations.

 

I just want you to picture being out of the country on holiday. Hell, let’s even say you’re travelling for school, for a college degree of some kind. One day into your trip, two people are killed and the folks you’re living with all say, “Oh, sure, did we not tell you? Our bad. This is our way.”

 

Would you stick around to “study” this group some more?

 

The scene immediately after these deaths is . . . um . . . unbelievable? That’s seems too gentle a word. Like, no way in hell would these two react the way they do, and the script hasn’t given us any reason to think they would. The motivations here aren’t just weak, they are nonexistent for any reasonable human being

 

Literally: “That was really, really shocking. I’m trying to keep an open mind, though,” one says.

 

Yeah, no, bro. You fucking run like your hair’s on fire.

 

So at this point, it’s kind of hard to stay tuned in. The morbid curiosity of the horror movie fan is about all the juice I have to keep going. I quit watching about twenty minutes later.

 

Listen—sometimes people do stupid shit, thus, it’s okay for your characters to do stupid shit. An astute reader, as I like to call them, pointed out that in my novel Sick, for instance, which is entirely set inside a high school where a small group of plucky survivors (sound familiar?) try to escape to a Safe Place during a Zombie Apocalypse . . . not a single one of them ever thinks to make a try for the nurse’s office.

 

That’s sort of a mistake, I suppose. If so, it’s a mistake based entirely on the fact that in four years of high school, I never one went to the nurse’s office. I assume we had one, but I swear to God, I don’t know for sure. So yeah, maybe an oversight on my part as the author, but it could be argued in context of the story that there was no need for them to try such a risky gambit. Still . . . yeah, someone should have at least pointed out the option.

 

So that was an oversight on my part. Granted.

 

The choice made at 1h 23m or of Midsommar is not a mistake.

 

It’s a choice, and it falls so flat that I can barely stand it. It’s infuriating, really, because I’m a big fan of Hereditary (in that it freaked me out so much I’ll never watch it again. That’s high praise). While the script sets up that our intrepid Americans are in fact doctoral candidates, it in no way emphasizes the great lengths to which they’ll go to get their “scoop” story for that dissertation. Furthermore, even if the script had tried to emphasize such a thing, the fact that their reaction to the horror unfolding before them is to argue about those dissertations rather than saying, “Bro, where’s the key to the car?!” is unforgiveable from a character-development standpoint. I would be happy to go along with this premise if the script had established just how critical obtaining these degrees was to the characters, but it doesn’t.

 

Of late, and I may come to regret this, I’ve tried as much as possible to insist on realism in my horror. When I’m writing or building an outline, I try to stop frequently and ask, “Now what would someone really do here?” You can motivate a character to do just about anything, and then come up with a really fun way to prevent them from getting their goal—that’s the whole point, in fact. Midsommar does not take this approach at all. It pits graphic violence against, of all things, academia, and it just does not sell for me.

 

Let your characters be real people who have real reaction commensurate with their background. Jack Bauer and Rambo and whoever else aren’t going to have a panic attack when they shoot someone. But I would. You would, too (one hopes). Those reactions are commensurate with our experience. So if you’re going to do something that would strike most people as odd, be sure it’s backed up in the character’s backstory somewhere.

 

Don’t be afraid to ask open-ended questions of your characters when you come to these choices. You may discover some rich gems hiding. I am working on a novel that I can’t talk about right now, but: in the story, this main character was knowingly entering into a situation where she may be called upon to take a life. Maybe several. How the hell do I motivate that? What would make a person do that? What has happened in her past to make her . . . ohhhh! GOT IT!

 

See what I mean? I made a brand new discovery about her history that gives the novel a whole new resonance.

 Do this, please, whenever your can. I don’t mind mindless horror from time to time, it has its place. So does mindless YA, mindless romance, mindless mystery. Swell. But if you’re setting out to make something else, which Midsommar is clearly trying to do, then for God’s sake, motivate those characters to justify the stupid shit they do on the page.