People will tell you writing is work, you must treat writing like a job, no serious writing ever came from treating it as a hobby. Basically, you have to commit.
Okay, sure. There are merits to those viewpoints. But never forget writing is an art, an act of creativity, a process of love and tears. You can't force it. For many people (myself included) the secret to good writing is like the secret to catching a soap bubble: you can't pluck it out of the air, you have to let it land.
To be sure, you can learn how to judge the falling bubble, note the prevailing wind, and know when and where to place your hand for the best chance to capture the bubble intact. You're still going to miss occasionally, and some days it's too windy or there are no bubbles at all. But you will eventually learn to catch more bubbles and keep them alive longer before they pop.
Here's the thing about that: you can't consider yourself a failure if there are no bubbles, or if they don't blow your way for a period of time. Everyone has dry spells -- fishermen, farmers, actors, lawyers. We writers think ourselves special and give it our own name; WRITER'S BLOCK.
Made you cringe, didn't it? Like a cat just walked over your grave. Yeah, I know. It's how we're trained. Like avoiding walking in the woods alone in the dark. It becomes ingrained on a subconscious level. But I think pauses are an integral and vital part of the writing process. Since it is a creative endeavor, it is naturally tied to your mood or your state of mind, and sometimes your state of mind is like a turbulent wind sending all of the bubbles away. Don't panic. You're not failing.
Writer's block is like a forest fire. Sometimes it's best to let the fire burn itself out. In places like Yosemite people went to a lot of trouble to put out naturally-occurring forest fires to "save" them, but we have since realized that naturally-occurring forest fires have been burning unchecked for precisely as long as there have been nature, forests, and fire. Nature adapts; fires are part of the process, letting new growth access to sunlight and other arboreal sciencey things. It's the whole Circle of Life jazz. Interfering with it just futzes it up.
Same with writer's block. It will pass, and in most cases take with it whatever was gumming up the works. I talked about forcing yourself to write in an earlier post. Unless you are a journalist or you make your whole living from putting words on paper, just let the forest burn. New growth will come. Trust it. If you put out the fire every time, you will do long-lasting damage to the forest.
I got to a rough patch in chapter two of my second book, and ended up not writing anything meaningful for about three months. It felt like I would never write again, like the whole forest was burning down. And then I started writing again, and started happily churning out pages again, working late into the night instead of turning in early, and even pulling up my manuscript at work during my lunch hour. The new growth was lush and inviting, and has a real chance to grow into a might forest since all of that old wood is gone.
So, if you are experiencing writer's block, do what I do: embrace it and let it happen; find some other outlet for awhile and don't beat yourself up. The desire to write will come back to you in its own time. You can't nab it out of the air, you have to let it land.
John R Berkowitz
Am I Doing This Right?
Writing the middle grade novel and living to tell about it.