Why I took Three Years off from Writing

One of the advantages of being in your forties with a well-established career that provides income and security for the future, is that you can randomly decide to take a year…cough…I mean a few years off from writing.  The main reason is because I came to the hard truth that my stories were just…meh.  My world was beautiful, the plot may have been interesting, but my characters seemed boring and kind of just sat there on the pages.  I think I was afraid of hurting my darlings or giving them real stakes to be scared of.

Self-publishing can be frowned upon by some in the literary world and there is still some controversy in deciding to pursue indie publishing instead of traditional publishing.  This means I’ve only got one chance to make a first impression and my readers deserve a quality product right from the start.  I’ve always known that self-publishing is a long-haul game and that it will require many years and a backlog of many books before I might see success or even profit.

So I want to do this right.  I already know that character development is the weakest of my writing skills and it’s going to be the characters who are the deciding factor of whether or not my stories are good.  In fact, one of the lines from my writer’s creed (developed during Writing with the Soul) was to create characters that my readers could root for.  Well, since I was failing spectacularly so far in that aspect, I decided to send myself back to school.

What I learned was, there is no secret.

In the last three years I have read a total of twenty-two writing craft books and took four writing related courses, searching for the secret that would unlock my writing craft.  What I learned was, there is no secret.  Pansters.  Plotters. Three Act Structure.  Story Grid.  Save the Cat.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s all the same.  Every story needs a character with a problem, followed by a series of events that raise the stakes, and ending with a final showdown to determine how the problem is solved.  

I realized what I was searching instead for was a system or pattern that made sense to my brain, helped me shape my story, and get words down on the page.  For me, that was creating a plotting blueprint and a character profiler inspired by K.M. Weiland, Becca Puglisi, Angela Ackerman, and John Truby.  I learned I was an info seeker and a plotter.  I needed to know the whys and hows of everything before I was able to see the whole picture.  This included the whys and hows of each of my characters as well.

If there is one thing I want other writers to take away from my experience, it’s this:  it’s okay to pause.

I wish someone had told me when I first started out that it was okay if I wasn’t sure what was working for me – that I could create my own process if none of the existing ones felt like the right fit.  If there is one thing I want other writers to take away from my experience, it’s this:  it’s okay to pause. It’s okay to admit something isn’t working and give yourself the time to figure it out.  Writing is personal, and the way you approach it should be too.