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Deesha Philyaw's avatar

Thank you so much for this, Jami! xo

In 2020, I hit reset on my current work-in-progress, a novel that I'd worked on off and on since 2007. I never finished a first draft; I wrote the beginning and the end, and got stuck on the middle. I thought I was just stuck with this vague writer's block, but my blocks are never truly vague. There's always something specific going on (or not going on), and in this case, there was a lot of growing as a writer and as a person that I needed to do in order to have the awareness I needed to diagnosis the problem. And the problem was two-fold: 1) my main character didn't really want anything, so there was no story, and 2) my main character was 92% me, so she would only do things that I would do in her situation, and her values were my values, all of which meant there was no story. So the first thing I had to do was make her her own person with values different from my own. From there, that freed her up to want things I don't want and to make decisions I wouldn't make. Now I had a story. I had this aha moment and reset in 2020, 13 years after first starting this novel. It's never too late!

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Page Huyette's avatar

I've been working on my first novel for about 200 years, and up until last year, thought I had the story line more or less figured out. I'd worked through some personal stuff that helped move it from a memoir in disguise to a true stand alone piece of fiction. But I was still struggling with moving the main character's evolution forward. Then suddenly one day something dramatic happened: She grew up and became an adult. Same person, but no longer a teenager and instead a grown thirty-something with enough life experience to distance herself from her upbringing. The story immediately became more interesting and the characters had more dimension and nuances than before. All of my struggles suddenly made sense. In order to get here, to this place where I could finish the story, I actually had to grow up inside in order to move the story forward.

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