Well, after beating my head against the nearest wall

I have realized why my writer-brain has been dragging its feet, kicking and screaming.

So: a little bit about the two dreaded words Writer's Block. I know people who stopped writing for a decade (literally); they'd sit down in front of the keyboard and stall there, in a state of mounting anxiety and self-loathing. The self-loathing part is easy to understand: They're writers. Writers write. They have no excuses and no reasons for not writing; they're just not writing. Maybe it's because they're lazy (it's not). Writing is their job. And they're not doing it.

Have I experienced this? Yes. But I don't generally call it writer's block. I call it Michelle is getting in her own way again. Badly. Which is not as concise, but that probably isn't surprising.

What I've discovered over the years when I'm struggling with a book is that I'm struggling because I have taken a wrong turn or am attempting to forcefully pilot the book in the direction I (intellectually) want it to go. When I'm being smart, I step back and assess. When I'm being ... not smart, I start a book from page one four times before I finally realize why the book will not do what I thought I wanted it to do. It's always smarter to step back.

I'm terrible at stepping back because of the above: I'm a writer, and writers write. So I write. This is not as useful as it sounds because I write the wrong words.

And now you ask why, if I know this by now, I wrote 200k of the wrong words in the West novel. I was struggling with the last 110k words and there are parts of that book that I loved. But it was the wrong book. And yet I could continue to write it.

Here's where it gets trickier.

Sometimes I have to write the wrong words before I can write the right words. I don't outline--it's book death for me--but I always have an end point toward which I'm writing. I know the general shape of the book. (Unless it's Skirmish. There was a LOT of screaming, hair-pulling and arguing with the computer screen for that one.) I know the general story. I know the general background of the characters.

Or I think I know. I don't sit down with zero idea at all. If I don't love worldbuilding, I understand the necessity--it's the structural glue that keeps things consistent. Characters, however, tend to have their own drives, and until they hit the page, those drives are sometimes invisible to me. In broad strokes, my general knowledge is correct.

But emphasis and hidden motivations or drives are often opaque to me because I have a visceral terror of overthinking a book. So these elements, the things that emotionally ground a character, that make a character true, are things that come out when I'm writing. And the character can be the right character. All of them can be. It's the sum of the parts and the interactions that is ... not the right book.

But the writing of those parts sometimes makes clear to me that my general idea is toast. It is the wrong shape to contain the people in it. It's more subtle than, say, Touch. I'm not trying to force characters to do things that they would never do. But if the parts are true, if the book is like a chorus, then one member of the choir is singing off-key. To the right song.

My current roadblock is NOT book destroying. It's only chapter destroying. Normally I would grind my teeth, throw things out, go back to Wrong Turn, and then continue, because who wants to hear a writer whining about their own incompetence?

However, I now have Patreon :D.