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.

Letting Characters Speak Words You Can't Say

Some of the most important things I've ever said, I said through a character in one of my novels.

Sometimes I don't realize it until I'm rereading a scene months later and something in it catches me. It could be a line of dialogue, an interior thought, or a moment of raw honesty that I recognize as something I needed to say and didn't know how to say it any other way.

Fiction creates a kind of permission that real life doesn't always offer. Behind the shelter of a character, a writer can approach truths that feel a bit too risky or maybe even embarrassing to state directly. The character can be afraid, or angry, or broken, or desperate in ways the author might not feel safe being in plain view. And paradoxically, that roundabout honesty often reaches readers more deeply than a direct confession would have.

Readers feel this from the other side too. A character says something and a reader thinks, yes, that's exactly it. That's the thing I've been carrying and couldn't name. The character has done the work of articulation that the reader couldn't do alone, and suddenly the reader feels less isolated in their own experience.

That exchange from writer to character to reader, where the truth travels the long way around, is one of the most quietly powerful things fiction does. It connects people across the distance of their private experience and says, you are not the only one. You are not alone.

That's one of the many reasons I write these stories. And it's a very worthy goal to set, every single time.

Has a fictional character ever said something that felt like it was meant specifically for you? Something you'd been feeling but couldn't find the words for? 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.

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.

The Writing Life Nobody Talks About

There's a version of the writing life that looks very appealing from the outside.

The author at a sun-filled desk, hot tea steaming nearby, words flowing onto the page with quiet purpose. Book covers lined up on the wall and a copy of each published book on a shelf behind them. A calendar marked with signing events and speaking engagements and the occasional literary lunch. It's a tidy little picture. It's also only about 10% of the actual experience.

The rest of it is something else entirely. They're the parts that don't make it into the author bio or the back flap photo, but they're every bit as important.

I've been writing novels for over two decades now and have more than 25 published books, with well over a half-million copies in print. And I can tell you with complete honesty that the writing life has been one of the most rewarding, most frustrating, most humbling, most surprising experiences of my entire existence. Sometimes all four of those things in the same afternoon!

The Long Silences

What nobody tells you about publishing a book is how much waiting is involved.

You write the manuscript, which takes months, sometimes longer. Then you wait to hear back from your editor. Then you revise, and wait again. Then the book goes into production, and you wait some more. By the time the book is actually in a reader's hands, you have often been living with that story for the better part of two years. You know every scene, every character beat, every line of dialogue so well that you can barely read it anymore with any objectivity at all.

And then the book releases, and the world moves on to the next thing fairly quickly, and you are already supposed to be well into writing the next one.

There are also the longer silences. The seasons when the books stop coming because life demanded something else of you. I've written about my own long season away from fiction before, and the complicated feelings that came with it. What I'll add here is the silence doesn't mean the writer in you has gone anywhere. It's just waiting for the conditions to change. And eventually, they do.

The Doubt That Doesn't Announce Itself

If you talk to any author or watch interviews that dig a little deeper into the less public side of a writer's life, you'll hear us admit that doubt is a near-constant companion in this work.

This isn't the kind that makes for a good story at a conference panel. No, this is the quiet, persistent, everyday kind. The manuscript that felt promising three weeks ago now feels flat and unconvincing. The scene you revised four times still isn't right and you're not sure it ever will be. The book you poured yourself into sits on a shelf somewhere, and you have no way of knowing whether it reached the person who needed it or just took up space and is now collecting dust.

Unfortunately, that kind of doubt doesn't resolve cleanly. It's just part of the landscape. You learn to write alongside it rather than waiting for it to go away, because to be honest? It never really goes away. You just get better at not letting it in the driver's seat.

The Joy That's Harder to Explain

Now, just to make sure I'm not all Debbie-downer today, I'll wrap up with the good stuff, even if it's something non-writers might struggle to understand.

There is something that happens when a story finally comes together. When a scene clicks into place, when a character does something that surprises you, when you read back a paragraph and think, yes, that's exactly right! It's a bit challenging to describe that to someone who hasn't experienced it, though. I see it something like discovery and realization. Like you've managed to catch something true and hold it still long enough to put it on the page.

That feeling is why the doubt doesn't win. It's why the long silences eventually end. It's why, after the waiting and the uncertainty and the seasons when the words wouldn't come, I sat back down and started writing again.

Oh, and every now and then, I also get letters. Not often anymore, but often enough. A reader who found something in one of my stories that met them in the middle of something hard. A note from someone who says a particular character helped them understand something about themselves that no one else had articulated. Those letters remind me that the work isn't just for me. That the long hours and the quiet doubt and the waiting are part of something that matters beyond the shelf life of any single book.

The writing life is harder than it looks. But despite all the craziness? I wouldn't trade a single bit of it.

What's something about your own work or creative life that looks different from the outside than it feels on the inside? I'd love to hear what's behind the curtain for you in the comments.

Faith in Fiction: How I Write What I Believe Without Preaching It

"Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under cover of romance [fiction] without their knowing it." ~ C.S. Lewis

I've been asked more than once how I keep faith from feeling forced in my novels.

That's a fair question. Anyone who reads broadly in the inspirational fiction genre has probably encountered both ends of the spectrum. You have the story where faith is woven in so naturally you barely notice the seams. Then, there's the story where a character delivers what amounts to a theological treatise in the middle of what was supposed to be an emotionally charged scene.

The second kind pulls you right out of the story. It reminds you of the author behind the curtain with a message to deliver, and suddenly you're no longer living inside the narrative. You're being instructed by it. This aligns with a common bit of advice: Show, don't tell. That second kind? It's telling, not showing.

That's not what I want to write. It's never been what I want to write. And I try hard not to write it.

But I also don't want to scrub faith out of my stories entirely, because it's genuinely part of how I see the world. It shapes how I understand people, why they make the choices they make, what they're really looking for underneath the surface desire or conflict. Removing it entirely would be like trying to write without a moral compass at all. While that's technically possible, it would produce something that doesn't actually sound like me.

So how do you write what you believe without turning your novel into a sermon?

Starting With People, Not Lessons

Sometimes, when in the beginning stages of writing a new story, it's tempting to start with the theme I want to explore or the spiritual truth I hope a reader takes away. But that will almost always lead to preaching or narrative instruction. 

No. To avoid that, you start with the people. The ones who are broken, contradictory, wanting things they can't quite name, afraid of things they won't quite admit.

Real human beings, even fictional ones, are complicated. They don't move through life collecting tidy lessons. They stumble into grace sideways. They resist the very thing that would help them. They sometimes do the right thing for the wrong reason and the wrong thing out of genuine love.

When I start there, with characters who feel true, the faith elements find their natural place in the story. A character wrestling with whether she can forgive someone who hurt her isn't a vehicle for a lesson on forgiveness. She's a person in pain, and the question of forgiveness is simply part of what that pain demands of her. The reader doesn't feel preached at because I'm not preaching. I'm just following this woman through something hard and letting the story ask the question without forcing the answer.

What Faith Actually Looks Like in a Story

In practice, this means faith in my novels tends to show up the way it shows up in real life. Quietly, imperfectly, and usually smack dab in the middle of something difficult.

It looks like a character who prays and doesn't get the answer she wanted. Or someone who grew up in the church and still isn't sure what he believes anymore. It looks like a moment of unexpected grace that a character almost misses because she's too busy being angry. And it also looks like doubt that doesn't get neatly resolved by the final chapter, because some doubt doesn't resolve that quickly and readers know that.

It won't look like a character who exists primarily to speak truth into another character's life at convenient narrative moments. And it doesn't look like a crisis of faith that gets wrapped up in a single conversation. It also won't have a redemption that costs nothing.

The faith that resonates in fiction is the faith that has been tested by something real. And the only way to write that honestly is to let the characters be tested by something real first.

Why It Matters to Get This Right

I write inspirational fiction because I believe story is one of the most powerful ways truth travels. Not truth shouted for all to hear. Lived truth. The kind that sneaks past your defenses because you're invested in a character and you feel what they feel before you've had a chance to decide whether you agree with the premise.

A heavy-handed faith narrative can do more damage than good. It can make readers feel manipulated, or confirm the suspicion that Christian fiction is more interested in delivering a message than telling a real story. I don't want to contribute to that.

Instead, I want a reader to finish one of my books and feel something true. Maybe something they couldn't have articulated before they read it. Maybe something they needed to feel without knowing they needed it.

If the faith in the story helped carry them there without announcing itself along the way, then I've done my job.

So, have you ever read a book where the faith element felt completely natural? How about one where it felt forced and pulled you out of the story? What made the difference? I'd love to hear your thoughts 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.

The Characters Who Won't Let You Go

There's a character sitting in the back of my mind right now who has been there for years.

She showed up long before I knew her full name, long before I understood what she wanted or what fears she had. She arrived as a feeling more than a person. A particular kind of quiet. A way of standing at the edge of a room and watching everything without quite belonging to any of it.

I didn't know what to do with her at first. Life had me shackled at the time to the demands of what was right in front of me. I didn't have the luxury of discovering who she was. So, I waited.

Writers talk a lot about the craft of building characters. About using personality profiles, backstory worksheets, goals exploration, motivation charts, and potential conflicts. Those tools have their place. But the characters who end up mattering most rarely arrive fully assembled. They show up in bits and pieces. A gesture. A voice. The wound that hasn't been named yet. And then they wait, sometimes patiently and sometimes not, for the story that finally fits them.

That's the part of writing nobody warns you about. I can't remember when I didn't have stories running through my head all the time. It's why I frequently embellished the truth when I reported what happened to others. Little did I know then the tiny seeds growing would lead to me one day creating characters for stories in real life. There was only one problem. Characters don't always stay where you put them.

When They Start Talking Back

Some of the most memorable people I've written have surprised me somewhere in the middle of a manuscript. I'll be moving a scene along, following the outline, doing what a responsible author does. Then, all of a sudden, a character will say or do something I didn't plan, and everything shifts. A piece of their past surfaces that I hadn't consciously invented. A reaction that reveals something deeper than I knew was there.

I used to find that unsettling. After all, these were supposed to be fictional characters. Made up. Not real. How in the world could something happen that I didn't expect? Wasn't I the writer? The creator? After spending time with other writers, I realized it was completely normal. Now I find it one of the most exciting parts of the process.

It's a sign that the character has become real enough to push back. That they're no longer just a role I've assigned but a person I'm discovering. When that happens, I've learned to stop and pay attention, even if it means setting the outline aside for a bit to follow where they're leading. Sometimes, that means stitching an unplanned scene together with the rest of the story.

The two central characters in my current work-in-progress did exactly that.

I thought I understood them when I started. I knew where they'd come from, what had gone wrong between them, what this story would ultimately ask of them. But as the manuscript has taken shape, both of them have revealed things about themselves that changed how I see the entire story. One of them, in particular, carries a specific kind of grief I hadn't fully accounted for. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it, and I had to go back and layer it in from the beginning.

That's the thing about characters that jump off the page. They don't let you off easy.

The Ones Who Stay

I've also noticed that the characters who take the longest to write are often the ones who linger longest after the book is finished.

There's something about sitting with a character through their whole arc that creates a special kind of bond. From the broken place where they start to the hard-won place where they land. By the time a manuscript is done, I know these people in the same way you know someone you've watched get past a struggle. You've seen what they're like at their worst. You've been there for the quiet moment when getting beyond the pain finally begins.

Readers sometimes ask if I miss my characters when a book is finished. Honestly? Yes. Some of them more than others. The ones who gave me the most trouble on the page are often the ones I think about afterward. As if working through their story somehow worked through something in me, too.

Maybe that's why I keep writing.

Have you ever had a character from a book who stayed with you long after the story ended? Who were they, and what was it about them that wouldn't let you go? Tell me in the comments.