Writing Wednesdays: Is writers' block a myth or a misery?

I wrote a post on writers’ block a while back, which you can check out right here, and it’s still one of the posts I link to the most. People still ask me a lot for advice on how to combat writers’ block.

This post is less about advice on how to deal with it (again, check out my previous post on the topic) and more about writers’ block itself, because I also see a lot of conflicting posts online about this. Is it even real? Are you just full of BS and being lazy and there’s no such thing? Or is it like, the big issue that writers face?

Who knows?

In my opinion, it’s a misery, not a myth. Maybe some writers don’t think they ever face it and they’re just procrastinating or something; but I know there are plenty of us out there who feel like it can be a real struggle.

You ever really feel like writing but have no idea what to write? Like, you’ve just read a great book that leaves you full of feels and you want to write something just as awesome and channel all of those feels into your Work In Progress (WIP) and… nothing. You’ve got nothing. You sit there and stare at where you left off and you. Have. Nothing.

Hey, it happens.

When I wrote about how to deal with writers’ block, I talked about sources of inspiration. Because sometimes I can just think, hey, I really need to/should/want to work on this story, but I just don’t know what to write or what to do! As soon as I read something else or watch a good movie or find an epic playlist, though, I’m away, knocking out a few thousand words.

And sometimes that just does not help. You can sit thinking all about this WIP you should be working on, with characters and a storyline you really love, but you have no passion for it right now. You know you have had passion, and you will again, but today it’s just not there. Maybe it hasn’t been for a couple of weeks, even.

Sure, sometimes it’s down to laziness. Ah, it’s okay, I’ll work on this another time. Right now I’m going to binge on makeup tutorials on YouTube. I’ve got time to write that next chapter before I should post it online.

Sometimes you don’t write because you have different priorities. School or work or family or self-care, whatever. (Which is totally okay!! I know I’ve said in other posts that if you really love something, you find the time, but sometimes you have to put that passion on a back-burner to deal with more immediate priorities.)

That’s not the kind of writers’ block I mean though. I’m talking about the kind where you really want to write but you’ve got nothing in you to write with. No fire. No ideas. You can try, sure, but it feels stiff and when you read it back it falls flat. That kind of writers’ block.

So no – I don’t think it’s a myth. And I think there are ways to try and work through it (again, this post) by staying inspired and excited about your WIP or remembering your love for writing.

You might also like this Writing Wednesdays post about how to fall in love with your story all over again.

I’d also like to note here that one thing I like to do if I have writers’ block for a WIP (either publishing-wise or Wattpad-wise) is to work on fanfiction. I never post it anywhere and have absolutely no plans to ever turn it into something I would submit for publishing so I can have as much fun as I want with it and don’t care if it’s pretty rubbish. It’s a great outlet for writing if I’m trying to push myself back into the swing of things.

And you might also like this post on why I think it’s totally okay to write fanfiction.

I guess this week’s post has been more of an opinion post than an advice post (which you can find here !!!), for which I am only partly sorry. I’ve just started work and hideously procrastinated the fact that I needed to write a backlog of Writing Wednesdays posts over the summer, so this is being written at 10pm the night before posting. I’m sorry about that.

But hey – I’d love to hear how you guys feel about writers’ block, and I’d also love to hear any suggestions for Writing Wednesdays posts you’d like to see come up in the future, so send me a message, Tweet me, or just drop a comment!