The Story Isn't Finished Yet

This is where I am right now.

Not at the end of something. At the middle of several things simultaneously. That's where creative people almost always are if they're honest about it. A novel in progress. A blog finding its rhythm again after too long away. A speaking calendar taking shape. A brand that is still becoming what it's meant to be. A homeschool year about to begin. A life that is fuller and more complicated and more alive with possibility than I could have predicted when the long quiet season finally ended.

The story isn't finished. Not even close.

I think about this when I'm tempted to measure the present moment against some imagined finished version of things. You know, with the novel completed, the platform established, the work fully recognized, the life tidily resolved into something that makes obvious sense from the outside.

That imagined finished version is a fiction, and not the useful kind. Real stories don't resolve into tidy conclusions. They keep going. They open into the next thing.

What I've learned, slowly and with significant resistance, is the middle is where all the living actually happens. Not the beginning, where it brims with potential, and not the end, with its satisfying conclusion or retrospective clarity. But the middle. Complicated and unresolved and full of loose threads, and where the story is most alive.

I'm in the middle. You probably are too.

And we need to keep telling our story. Thank you for being here for this part of it.

Where are you in your story right now? Beginning, middle, or somewhere you can't quite name yet? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

When the Work Feels Like Worship

There are mornings when I sit down to write and I feel different.

Not every morning, mind you. I want to be honest about that. Most mornings the work is work. It requires effort and attention and the willingness to push through resistance, and it produces something useful if I'm fortunate. It also produces something that needs significant revision if I'm not. That's the ordinary version, and it's the one that shows up most often.

But occasionally something different happens. The resistance falls away. The words arrive with a clarity and an ease that seems to truly be going somewhere. The work stops feeling like something I'm making and starts feeling like something I'm participating in. Like something larger than the manuscript, larger than my own creative effort, moving through me rather than from me.

I don't know exactly what to call that experience, but I know what it feels like.

It feels like worship.

This isn't exactly easy to explain without sounding either mystical or religious, and I'm trying not to be either. But there is something in the act of creating, of taking the gifts and the calling and the unique perspective you've been given and using them fully, at full capacity, toward something true. That connects to the act of praise in a way I find impossible to deny.

We were made to create. When we do it wholeheartedly, something in us recognizes the rightness of it. Something settles. Something sings.

That makes showing up worthwhile, even on the ordinary mornings that don't feel like anything at all.

Have you ever experienced a creative moment that felt like more than just making something? A moment that touched a deeper place? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Small Acts of Creative Faithfulness

Not every creative act is a grand gesture.

Most of them aren't. Most of them are small.

• A paragraph written before the house wakes up
• A sketch made on the back of an envelope
• A melody hummed into a voice memo while driving somewhere ordinary

Small, unglamorous, unremarkable in the moment. Accumulated over time into something that matters.

I've been thinking lately about the phrase creative faithfulness. It's the practice of showing up consistently for the work, in whatever form that showing up is available to you in a given season. Not the heroic version where you sacrifice everything for the art. The quiet version where you carve out fifteen minutes because fifteen minutes is all you have, and you protect it with everything you have.

This reframing has helped me in the seasons when grand gestures weren't available. When the manuscript wasn't moving and the schedule was impossible and the conditions for serious creative work simply didn't exist. In those seasons, small acts of faithfulness kept something alive that might otherwise have gone quiet.

• a journal entry
• a voice memo
• a single scene written badly just to prove the words were still there

Small doesn't mean insignificant.

In creative work, small and consistent almost always outperforms grand and sporadic. The daily paragraph outlasts the occasional marathon session. The sketch made every morning becomes the body of work that the weekly large-scale effort never quite produces.

Be faithful in the small things. The small things are doing more than they look like they're doing.

What does a small act of creative faithfulness look like in your daily life? The tiny practice that keeps something alive? I'd love to hear in the comments.

The Project That Scares Me

Do you have a project sitting in the back of your mind that you haven't started yet? I do!

I'm not going to tell you what it is, partly because it's not ready to be spoken out loud, and partly because I think most creative people know exactly the project I'm talking about without me having to name mine. I'm sure you have one too. The idea that keeps returning no matter how many times you set it aside. The one that feels more personal than anything else you've made, more exposed, more likely to fail in a way that would cost you in a significant way.

You think you're not ready for it, but you might be more ready than you think.

Fear is a reliable indicator in creative work, but it points in two directions, and you have to learn to read which one it's signaling. Sometimes fear means stop. The project isn't right, the timing isn't right, something needs more development before it's ready to be made.

But sometimes fear means go.

It means you're standing at the edge of something that matters enough to be a bit scary and uncertain, something that has the potential to be the most significant work you've done, if you can find the courage to begin it.

The project that scares you most is usually the one that has the most of you in it. Which means it's the one that has the most to give.

I'm working up to it. Maybe you are too.

Maybe we both just need permission to admit it's there to muster the courage to take that first step.

Is there a creative project you've been afraid to start? One that keeps coming back no matter how many times you set it aside? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

What I Create When No One's Watching

Some creative work exists entirely for an audience.

The polished post. The carefully considered release. The project shaped from the beginning with publication or performance or presentation in mind. That work has its place. Sharing creative work with the world is quite meaningful, and I take it seriously.

But there's another kind of work that happens when nobody's watching. That's where integrity and dedication come into play.

The journal entry that will never be read by anyone else. The scene written just to understand a character better, with no intention of putting it in the manuscript. The creative experiment that exists purely to find out what happens if... No audience, no stakes, no outcome required beyond the learning.

It's where you find out what you actually think, what you're genuinely drawn to, or what energizes you when external validation is removed from the equation entirely. The work you do when nobody's watching tells you things about yourself that the public work can't, because the public work is partially shaped by awareness of how it will be received.

But the private work feeds everything else.

It's also where the most genuinely surprising creative discoveries happen. The ones that eventually find their way into the public work in forms you couldn't have planned. The unseen work over time becomes the foundation of the seen work.

Create something today that no one will ever see. Then, take a moment to discover what it tells you.

Do you have a creative practice that exists just for you? Something that never gets shared? What does it give you? I'd love to hear in the comments.

The Discipline Needed to Produce Greatness

In the world of writing, everyone wants to talk about inspiration.

The moment the idea arrives. Getting into the flow where the words come easily, the work feels effortless, and the creative output exceeds expectations. Don't get me wrong. Those moments do happen. But they're also not where most of the work gets done.

Most of the work gets done in the mundane, ordinary sessions. The ones where you sit down solely because it's Wednesday morning, and mornings are when you write. The ones where the words come slowly and require hard-fought excavation. The ones that don't feel like anything in particular is happening, but as they accumulate over weeks and months, they turn into something worthwhile.

That's the discipline and the more boring aspect of the writing life. It's not always about the dramatic public declaration, the meaningful pivot, or the inspiring story of deciding to take the work seriously. Sometimes, it's just the quiet, unglamorous practice of showing up when nothing in you particularly wants to do the work.

Inspiration is a visitor. Discipline is a resident.

The creative people I most admire are not the ones who wait for the right conditions. They're the ones who create the conditions. Who protect the time, sit in the chair, open the document or the sketchbook or the instrument, and begin. Not because it always produces great work. But because it produces work, and work is the only raw material that can produce greatness.

Show up. Do the thing. Let inspiration find you already working.

What does your creative discipline look like on the days when you don't feel like showing up? I'd love to hear what gets you to the chair in the comments.

Is Creativity a Gift or a Calling? Yes

People ask this as if it has to be one or the other.

Either creativity is something you were given or it's something you were called to do. Like it has to be either a natural aptitude, a talent distributed at birth like eye color or height or a vocation with weight and purpose and intentional direction. The debate implies a choice, as if the answer changes what you do with it.

I think it's both, and I think them working in tandem makes a huge difference.

A gift without a calling can stay perpetually potential. Admired, occasionally exercised, but never fully inhabited. You have the ability but not the orientation, the talent but not the direction. The gift sits in you like an instrument no one plays, capable of music that never gets made.

A calling without a gift is its own kind of frustration. The deep sense of purpose unmatched by the capacity to execute it, the vision outrunning the ability to bring it into being.

When both are present, thought, and when the gift and the calling align, the possibilities become nearly endless. The creativity stops being just a thing you do and starts being a thing you are. It becomes the lens through which you see everything else, the mode through which you process experience and make meaning and contribute something to the world that only you, with your particular combination of wiring and history and perspective, could have made.

But the most important part? It's something you shouldn't take for granted. Something you should steward well.

Whether it arrived as gift, calling, or both, it showed up in you for a reason. The question is what you'll do with it.

Do you think of your creativity as a gift, a calling, or something else entirely? I'd love to hear how you understand it in the comments.

The Season That Felt Like Drought

There are seasons that feel like nothing is growing.

The creative well runs dry. The words don't come. The projects that used to energize you sit untouched while life makes demands that feel more urgent and leave nothing over for the work you love. The silence stretches, and somewhere in the stretching it starts to feel permanent. Like this might be who you are now, someone who used to create, past tense.

I lived in that season. Longer than I expected to, longer than I would have chosen.

What I know now that I didn't know then is that drought seasons are not dead seasons, even when they feel exactly like dying. A tree in drought is doing something underground that it can't do when water is plentiful. It's sending roots deeper, searching further, finding sources of sustenance it never would have reached in the comfortable seasons.

That isn't necessarily what you want to hear when you're in the middle of it. I know I didn't. Regardless of what you know, the drought feels like drought. Dry and depleting and resistant to easy recovery.

But looking back from the other side, I can see what grew in me during that season that couldn't have grown any other way. A clarity about what the work actually means to me, stripped of the external validation that had been quietly propping up my sense of purpose without my realizing it. A deeper understanding of why I write, when writing itself was unavailable to answer the question.

The drought didn't end my story. It deepened it.

I would have never discovered or learned that from inside it. But I'm grateful to know it now.

Have you lived through a drought season (creative, spiritual, or otherwise) and found something after surviving that season that surprised you? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Question Every Audience Eventually Asks

It comes in different forms, but it's always the same question.

Sometimes it arrives directly: How do you find the courage to keep creating when you don't know if it matters? Sometimes it's more specific: How do you keep writing when no one seems to be reading? Sometimes it's quieter than that. It might not be a question at all but a look, a hesitation, the way someone lingers after a talk with something they can't quite bring themselves to say.

But it's always the same question underneath. Does this work mean anything? Am I making something that matters, or am I just making noise?

I've asked it myself more times than I can count. Every honest creative person has.

And I can't resolve the uncertainty. I still feel it nearly every day. However, one thing I've learned is you are almost never the right judge of your own work's impact. The piece you labored over and doubted and almost didn't finish is often the one that reaches someone in a way you'll never fully know. The moment you almost cut is often the moment someone else underlines, highlights, or marks with a dog-eared page.

You don't get to see most of what your work does in the world. You have to make it faithfully and release it and trust that it finds who it's meant to find.

That's not a comfortable answer. But it's the honest one. And every time I give it, I watch the person who asked the question visibly relax, as if permission to not know was exactly what they needed.

Create faithfully. Release bravely. Trust the rest.

Have you ever doubted whether your creative work matters? What brought you back to it anyway? I'd love to hear your story in the comments.

Why I Speak About Story

I didn't set out to be a speaker.

In fact, the first time I was asked to share my story, a well-respected woman approached me just before, with her narrowed eyes and slight curl of one side of her mouth. She looked me up and down and said, "Who do you think you are coming here to talk to us women? You're barely out of school and not married or a mother, and you're just getting started in life. What could you possibly have to share that would help us?"

Ouch, right? That one hurt. A lot! And although I did get up in front of those women to share my story, I allowed that woman's words to haunt me for the next 15 years. Every time I thought I might have some insight or wisdom to share with someone else, either individually or in a group, that "imposter syndrome" would rear its ugly head, and I'd keep my mouth shut.

Instead, when the opportunity to write fell in my lap, I jumped right on that path. Writing has always held a special place in my heart, and I'd still consider it my primary calling. But for too long, I hid behind the protection of distance between what I wrote and my audience.

After I had a few books and a couple dozen articles under my belt, the opportunity to speak came my way again. Although a part of me wanted to run the other way, I chose to step forward. It took everything I'd learned about communicating truth through story to figure out how to do it standing in front of a room full of people instead of alone at a desk.

Once I stood at the front, the small audience looking at me, I realized something.

The principles are the same. A room full of people responds to story the same way a reader does. The defenses lower, the attention sharpens, the emotional access opens. A well-placed story in the middle of a talk does what a well-placed scene does in a novel. It makes the abstract concrete. It makes the distant personal. It makes the truth become real in a relatable way.

I speak about story because story is what I know most deeply. It's also because the longer I've worked with it in fiction, content, or conversation, the more convinced I've become that it's one of the most powerful tools available to anyone trying to communicate something that matters.

Not just writers. Anyone.

The business leader trying to inspire a team. The teacher trying to reach a struggling student. The parent trying to explain something important to a teenager who has stopped listening to direct instruction. Story reaches where argument can't. It always has.

That's why I speak about it. When you understand how story works, it changes how you communicate everything else.

Has a speaker ever used a story that completely changed how you received what they were saying? What made it land? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The One Person Who Changes Everything You Create

Every writer has an ideal reader living somewhere in the back of their mind. And every content creator has an ideal viewer.

Not the entire audience. Not the demographic profile or the market category. One specific person. The individual toward whom you're instinctively aiming, whose response you're imagining when you make a thousand small decisions about what to include, what to cut, what to convey plainly and what to leave for the individual to discover on their own.

Mine has shifted over the years, but she has always shared a few qualities. She's honest with herself, even when it's uncomfortable. She carries her faith seriously but not rigidly. She has been through something hard and is still standing, a little worn but not defeated. She reads because she needs more than distraction. She needs to feel less alone in the specific texture of her experience.

I write for her.

Knowing the individual who will receive what you create doesn't narrow the content. It focuses it. In writing, the most universal books are almost always the ones written with deep specificity toward a particular kind of reader, because specificity is what creates the feeling of being truly seen. A reader who feels seen becomes a reader who stays.

If you create anything — writing, art, music, content of any kind — knowing your one reader, your one viewer, your one listener, changes everything about the choices you make. It moves you from performing for a crowd to speaking directly to that one, individual person who needs what you have to offer.

That is where real connection begins.

Who do you create for? Is there one person, real or imagined, whose response matters most to you? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

The Mastermind Effect: Why Brainstorming Partners Are Essential

This post is geared more toward those in the Creatives category. You know who you are. Ideas buzz in your mind at all hours of the day and night, and you're constantly looking for things or thinking outside the box at any given situation. If you're a creative person, you already know the particular loneliness of having a mind that won't quiet down.

• The ideas that arrive at eleven o'clock at night when you should be sleeping.
• The project that's been living in the back of your thoughts for months, half-formed and insistent, waiting for the right conditions to become something real.
• The vision you can see clearly from the inside but struggle to explain to people who don't naturally think the way you do.

Creative minds are a gift. They're also, at times, an isolating one.

Over the years of working in a creative field, I've discovered that the ideas themselves are rarely the problem. Most creative people have more ideas than they'll ever have time to execute. The challenge is finding that small, trusted circle of people who can help you see what you're actually building, ask the questions that move you forward, and tell you the truth when something isn't working yet. That makes an enormous difference!

You may have heard this called a mastermind group. I much prefer the phrase finding your people.

Why General Community Isn't Enough

A broad creative community is sustaining and necessary. The workshops, the guilds, the online groups, the conferences. All of it matters.

But there's a difference between being known generally and being known specifically. A large community knows you as a creative person. A mastermind circle knows your particular project, your particular voice, your particular way of approaching a problem. They also know it well enough to meet you exactly where you are when you're stuck.

Anyone can offer encouragement, though. A true brainstorming partner offers insight. And that's far more valuable.

• They can stand at a distance and say, I think the problem is here, and here's why.
• They can ask the single question that reorients everything.
• They can remind you of what you said about your project at the beginning, before you lost the thread, and help you find your way back.

That's what I used to have in the early years of my writing career. Then, through a series of unforeseen circumstances and betrayals, I lost it all. It wasn't until recently that I realized just how deeply the impact affected me.

For years, I struggled to maintain the writing pace and the engagement I had established. With each passing month, the community, the interest, and the support dwindled, until no one even knew I was an author anymore. My days got consumed by reacting to life instead of planning it. I ended up living day to day, without much of a plan, reacting to the immediate without any intentionality or progress toward my goals.

Eventually, I started believing that what I did didn't matter to anyone, because no one was reaching out. No one was asking when my next book was releasing or about any current projects. And instead of squaring my shoulders and first *being* the engagement I needed, I watched life happen all around me. Watched others enjoying and celebrating the community and support they had found. All the while, feeling like an outsider and trying to find my place again.

How to Find The Community You Need

Of course, these relationships develop slowly and can't be forced. For someone like me who tends to move at high speed with my fingers in multiple things at once, it's not exactly what I want to hear. But I need to listen, regardless. I need to rebuild....on several levels. And this is how:

• Start in community.
• Pay attention to who asks good questions.
• Watch those who engage with specificity and care.
• Look for those who shows up consistently.
• Find those who demonstrates genuine interest in other people's work.

Those are the people in whom you want to invest more deeply. And when you're ready to invest your time or attention:

• Be willing to offer before you ask.
• Show up for someone else's creative process before you need them to show up for yours.

The relationships that grow into real brainstorming partnerships almost always begin with you giving first. You need to extend generosity without any expectation of immediate return. And while I've spent years sowing into others, my giving always came with hope attached to it. Hope that someone would return the favor.

It's definitely a fine line to walk, as you ARE hoping to form relationships, but you don't want that to be the condition of your generosity.

I'm definitely still learning. Even though I'm quite outgoing and help others smile when they see me, the intimacy of those sustained and mutually beneficial or rewarding relationships still eludes me...even at nearly 50 years old.

Just remember. Your brainstorming circle doesn't have to be made up of people who do exactly what you do. A novelist and a visual artist and a musician can form a deeply effective creative circle if they share the qualities that matter:

• Curiosity
• Honesty
• Genuine investment in each other's work

The medium is less important than the mindset. Your ideas and passions deserve that kind of company. And so do you.

Have you found the people who understand how your creative mind works? Who can meet you in the middle of a stuck project and help you find your way through? How did you find them, and what has that relationship made possible? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Writing for Hire: What Freelance Writing Taught Me

Not every word I write belongs to a novel.

This is something readers don't always know about authors, particularly authors who are building or rebuilding a career. The writing life frequently involves a significant amount of work that never carries your name on the cover, that pays the practical bills while the creative work takes the longer road it always takes.

I do freelance content writing. Blog posts, articles, web copy. All produced for clients across a range of industries, in voices that are not my own, on topics that have nothing to do with historical fiction or faith or the particular world I build when I'm working on a manuscript. It's professional, it's deadline-driven, and it requires a different set of skills than novel writing does.

It has also, unexpectedly, taught me things about my own voice that I'm not sure I would have learned any other way.

What Freelance Writing Actually Looks Like

The practical reality is this: content writing pays consistently in a way that novel royalties do not.

Publishing is often a slow-moving financial ecosystem. Books take years from concept to release, royalties arrive on a delayed schedule, and advances are earned out over time. For a writer who is also running a household, homeschooling teenagers, and maintaining a platform, the gap between what the creative work produces and what daily life requires has to be filled somehow.

Freelance content writing fills that gap. It's not glamorous, and it doesn't scratch the same creative itch that fiction does, but it's honest work that uses the skills I have. I've made peace with that trade-off now, but it definitely took much longer than it should have.

What It Taught Me About Voice

But there was an unexpected gift in this part of my writing career that I didn't like at first. Writing in other people's voices made me better understand my own.

The time I've spent deliberately adjusting tone, vocabulary, sentence rhythm, and level of formality to match a client's brand and audience, has heightened my awareness of how those elements function. I started to notice the choices I'd make consciously that I used to make by instinct. And when I returned to my own work after a stretch of client writing, my own voice feels distinct in a way it didn't before. More recognizable. More deliberate.

It's the rhythm of my sentences. The way I move between the specific and the reflective. The place where warmth lives in my prose and how I find it when I've temporarily lost it. Freelance writing gave me that awareness, and that's made me a more intentional novelist.

Maintaining Balance

Now, there are seasons when the freelance load has been heavy enough that returning to my manuscripts feels harder than it should. It's as if the writing muscles have been used all day for someone else's purposes and have nothing left for my own. Learning to protect the creative work, to treat the novel as a priority even when the client deadlines are louder, has been an ongoing discipline.

I don't always get that balance right. But I keep returning to it, because the freelance work funds the life that makes the fiction possible.

Do you do creative work alongside other work that pays the bills? How do you protect the thing that matters most when everything else is making noise? I'd love to hear how you navigate it in the comments.

Writing Between the Lessons: Homeschooling and the Creative Life

Most mornings in our house, the school day and the writing day start at roughly the same time. But this isn't as harmonious as it sounds.

I've been homeschooling my teenagers for years now, which means that the person responsible for their education and the person trying to finish a novel are the same person, working in the same house, often at the same hours, with competing demands that don't particularly care about each other's schedules. It's a balancing act I chose deliberately and would choose again. It's also, on certain days, genuinely exhausting.

One of the things I've committed to on this blog is telling the truth about what the writing life actually looks like. And the truth is that mine looks like this.

What Homeschooling Takes From the Writing

The most obvious cost is time. Hours that might otherwise go to a manuscript go to lesson planning, teaching, and the general orchestration of another human being's educational life. Writing sessions get interrupted. Creative momentum, which is a fragile thing under the best of circumstances, gets broken by the real and legitimate needs of real people who are more important than any manuscript.

I've had to make peace with a slower pace of production than I might otherwise maintain. Books take longer. The gaps between projects stretch out. There are days when I sit down to write with whatever is left after everything else has been handled, and what's left is not always much.

I've had to learn to write in smaller windows than I'd like, to pick up a scene in the middle and find my way back into it quickly, to treat fifteen good minutes as worth having even when I'd prefer three uninterrupted hours.

What Homeschooling Gives Back

However, homeschooling has made me a better observer.

Teaching requires you to explain things you've understood for so long that you stopped noticing how they work. It requires patience with the process of learning, attention to how understanding actually develops, and a willingness to meet someone exactly where they are rather than where you wish they were. Those are good skills for a novelist to practice.

I've also found that the conversations that happen naturally in a homeschool environment (all the tangents and the questions and the moments when a history lesson turns into a two-hour discussion about human nature and the way things change) feed the part of me that writes.

My teenagers are interesting people with sharp minds and genuine opinions, and spending serious time with them has given me more insight into how people actually think and talk and process the world than I could have gotten any other way.

What Holds It Together

Honestly? Faith and flexibility, in roughly equal measure.

The faith piece is straightforward. I firmly believe this is the right choice for our family in this season, and that conviction steadies me on the days when the balance feels impossible. The flexibility piece is harder won. It means releasing the idea of a perfect writing day and finding genuine gratitude for the imperfect one. It means accepting that this chapter of life will eventually look different, and that the constraints of right now are not permanent.

In the meantime, I write between the lessons. Sometimes in the twenty minutes before the next subject starts, in the hour after everyone has gone to their own work for the afternoon, or the wee hours of the late night after everyone's in bed.

It's not the writing life I imagined when I started, but it might be better, actually, for being so thoroughly rooted in the real one.

How do you manage the creative work alongside everything else life requires of you? I'd love to hear what your balance looks like in the comments.

When the Story Stalls: What I Do When the Words Won't Come

There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over a writing session gone wrong.

It's not the peaceful quiet of early morning before the house wakes up or the silence of the late night after everyone is tucked in bed. The kind where ideas surface easily and the words seem to know where they're going.

No, this. This is the other kind. The kind where I've been staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes and the cursor hasn't moved, and I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should go reorganize a kitchen cabinet instead.

Every writer knows that quiet. Nobody talks about it enough.

I've lived through several versions of it over the years. The short kind, where a scene simply isn't cooperating and a good night's sleep resets everything. The longer kind, where weeks pass and the manuscript sits untouched and the guilt about the manuscript sitting untouched somehow makes it harder to open. And the longest kind. The season I've written about recently here, when life demanded everything I had and the creative well went completely dry for a stretch of years.

They're not all the same problem, and they don't all have the same solution.

When the Scene Is the Problem

Sometimes the stall is right in the manuscript I'm writing. One scene, one chapter, one conversation between characters that refuses to come together. When that's what's happening, I've learned that pushing harder rarely helps. Staring at a stuck scene with increasing frustration is a bit like pressing harder on a key that won't turn. Eventually something gives, but it's usually not the lock.

For stuck scenes, I've learned to step back and ask whether the scene is stuck because I'm writing it wrong or because it shouldn't exist at all. Those are two very different problems. A scene written from the wrong point of view, or entered at the wrong moment, or carrying too much expository weight will resist you. But sometimes a scene stalls because some part of you already knows it doesn't belong in the story. It's just taking a while for your conscious mind to catch up.

I've deleted entire chapters that I worked on for days once I finally admitted that's what was happening. It's never a comfortable moment. But the story always moves more freely afterward. And don't worry. Those deleted chapters are never permanently deleted. I've almost always found use for them somewhere else, in some other story or book. Nothing written is ever wasted. It's simply repurposed.

When the Writer Is the Problem

Other times the stall has nothing to do with the manuscript itself. Life is loud, or heavy, or simply full in a way that leaves nothing left over for fiction. The creative part of my brain requires a certain amount of margin to function, and when that margin disappears, when every hour is spoken for and every emotional reserve is already committed somewhere else, the words stop coming. The story isn't broken. I'm just temporarily running on empty.

That's a harder stall to work through, because the solution isn't craft-related. You can't outline your way out of depletion. Sometimes the most honest thing a writer can do is set the manuscript down without guilt and tend to whatever is actually demanding attention. The story will still be there.

I've had to learn that lesson more than once. And no matter how often it happens, it doesn't come naturally to me.

What Actually Helps

When I'm stuck and the cause isn't immediately obvious, a few things have helped me find my way back.

Reading almost always helps. Not reading about writing, though. Just reading fiction I love (the kind that reminds me why stories matter) rekindles something in me that a stuck manuscript can temporarily extinguish. There's something about immersing in someone else's well-crafted world that loosens whatever has tightened up in my own.

Getting away from the desk helps too. Some of my best breakthroughs on a stubborn scene have happened in the car, or on a walk, or in that half-awake space just before sleep. That's why I keep a notepad and pen by my bed, in the car, and in various places around the house. I also learned how to quickly access my voice recording on my phone for when inspiration strikes. The brain keeps working on the problem even when you stop forcing it to produce. Giving it room to do that quietly is sometimes all it needs.

And occasionally, what helps most is simply lowering the stakes for a session. Instead of sitting down to write the scene, I'll write around it.

• Journal from a character's perspective.
• Draft a scene that will probably never appear in the book but helps me understand something about where they are emotionally.
• Take the pressure of the actual manuscript off for an hour and let myself write badly and freely.

All of this helps me remember that words still come when I'm not gripping them so tightly. The story always comes back. That's the thing I keep having to remind myself in the middle of a stall. It always comes back.

When you're stuck on something hard, whether it be a project, a decision, or a difficult conversation, what gets you unstuck? Is it pushing through, stepping away, or something else entirely? I'd love to hear your approach in the comments.