Where's your writing stuck?

Long solo writing stints, rejections and years with no words. Welcome to the painful life of a writer. All writers get stuck.  This is the place we all get to, and there are so many places your writing can get stuck. I can’t tell you how many calls I have with authors who are in a sticky place in their writing.  I know this place well, but my sticky place is  in the promoting of books, not in the writing. I can write them fast, edit them easily and even do the first few book talks like a star. But then something happens where I just assume the book will ‘sell itself’ and my energy to keep booking talks, events and festivals to share the book tails off.

‘Perhaps the book is so wildly captivating that the book will just become an international bestseller ORGANICALLY with no real effort on my part,’ I think. “Perhaps Reese Witherspoon will pick it up for her bookclub.”

“Perhaps this book will get an international secondary rights deal.”

So many authors I  have worked with over the years believe the same. I am currently on our annual summer writing residency in Greece (yes be jealous friends) and I have four authors here who are about to publish in the next six months and they are working on the next steps.

“I have booked two book talks this year,” one told me (with a book coming out in September). This is the misconception authors make, that a few attempts is enough.

“Two!" I laugh. "You will need to have at least 20 over the next two years,” I tell her “and in fact you work so much harder getting your book into bookshops, doing book talks and launches.” But this is also the reason we write, right? It is not just to spend quiet time with your own words, but ultimately to share them.

Some of the place we all get stuck

You are simply stuck on the idea of writing. You are dreaming, wondering and thinking about the stories. Perhaps it’s on your vision board, and in your diary, but there’s nothing much on paper yet.  You are going to start some time in the future.  Solution?

You wrote a bit of it  .. a few years ago. Now you are stuck with your document sitting in a folder and you are not sure if its worth picking up and revisiting, or you should write something else.  Solution? Time to do a market analysys and see if there genre is still relevant and readers are there. If so, book a few months and set a deadline to move to your second draft.

You are stuck because its taking so long. You started years ago with this. It’s taken a few years to get this version and it's still nowhere really. Or its 180,000 words and you are not half done.  One of my authors (now published) took ten years and her book was 350,000 pages. “Longer than the Bible?” I asked her.  Solution? Its okay for a book to be too long, or take a long time, but you will just need a good editor to cut it back to 80,000 words.

Your book is just not working. This is when you have spent a few years on a novel, even pitched it, but you just know its not brilliant. You know you haven’t quite nailed it yet, but you don’t know how to fix or improve it and you have done more drafts than you can bear to remember. Solution? This is actually the path of most novelists. Get a professional manuscript appraisal with some very tough-love feedback.  You can also get some beta reader reports but it may be worth paying more for a professional to shred your book.

You can’t get a publisher, and you know your book is good. Again, this is the roadblock 85% of writers face, no matter how good the book. You have sent it off to every agent and publisher you can find in your genre and spent a year querying, and no bites. You may not even have had a ***# reply yet.  Solution? Do a total and radical rewrite on your query letter and proposal, even get someone else to write it with a totally different take. Give it another fair effort, and then consider self publishing (or indie publishing) with a publishing company