When I was more active in the industry, I was often asked if I ever got writer's block and how I dealt with it. The more times I answered the question, the less sure I was that my answers were accurate, and I finally know the problem. My definition of writer's block was never really defined.

I've always seen writer's block as an attempt to work on a specific piece, but not being able to go further. I had never seen it as the inability to write altogether, because I've never had that happen. I could always write SOMETHING. I could always start a new story, write a character outline, work on an existing novel, or add content to my web page. If I got stuck on one project, I was able to pick up on another. In this, having many irons in the fire can be a blessing. However, in some ways, it can be a curse as well.

Let me give you an example. I'm writing a novel now (one of my erotic romances, so it will be written under my erotica pen name). This is a novel I started ages ago, but never finished. I didn't see myself as blocked on it, I was simply writing other things. This, I now see, is not quite true. The reason I am doing other things, is because I wasn't altogether comfortable with how this novel was progressing. It seems that when a project flows I'm happy to stay with it, and when it doesn't meet my standards, I shut down and work on something else...until I solve the problem, and can continue. Often this means deleting the last thing I wrote and rewriting it.

It's as if part of my mind knows what is supposed to happen and if I don't go in the right direction, it loses interest. So I've been consciously working on figuring out what is wrong, whenever I want to stop working on a specific piece, and I have to say the strategy is working. Let me give you an example from my current project.

I had written some pretty good scenes this week (which I'm told are exceptional but then, I'm never all that confident of my own prose, no matter how many times I tell myself it's good stuff). The last scene I ended up writing before I drifted away from the project was, like the other scenes, a decent scene. It kept the action flowing, it was interesting, it didn't lag. But then, I tried to regard the book as a whole and realized the pacing was off. The event that I wanted to happen still needed to happen, but not quite this soon. I had to do something else first. Essentially, I had designed a very big surprise/twist (I'm famous for those), but I didn't give the reader a chance to get used to the old circumstance first. The book is fast paced, so that it pulls the reader along. Twists work best when you give a reader a bit of time to form an opinion of their own, THEN jerk the rug out from under them.

It's something I enjoy doing and, apparently, it's something my readers enjoy having done to them. Surprises work best when they completely fit the story, they're not out of left field, and yet, they still catch readers completely off guard. The surprise I'm referring to in this case is the same, but by moving it to later into the book, I give the reader more of a chance to attach themselves to a truth they have assumed but isn't actually there. It makes the surprise, when it finally occurs, that much stronger.

The question is, if I didn't know this consciously, how does the process actually work? You have to learn to trust your writer's instinct. No matter how much I intellectually like a scene, there is still a part of me that knows it can be better. When I offend that part of me, it distracts me from working, rather than to let me continue writing past the problem. So, in theory, if I stop and really think when I find myself distracted, I should be able to fix the problem and then continue on. If the price for that is deleting a scene I like, so be it.

With any luck, this will prove itself out in the future, and I'll finally be back to my old writing self. If not, it's still an interesting circumstance to consider.