I've mentioned in passing before that while I was working on my second book, I went through a period I call my "unwriting" — three, maybe four months of it. I want to talk about it properly this time, because from inside it, it felt like the book was simply going to end in nothing.
The first book came easily. Not effortlessly — I mean the text seemed to know where it was going, and I just barely kept up writing it down. So when the second book suddenly went quiet, it caught me off guard. I'd gotten used to thinking of myself as someone who knows how to write. And then I'd sit down at the computer, hands over the keyboard — and inside, nothing. It wasn't that I had no ideas. I actually knew roughly what needed to happen next with my heroine. I just couldn't turn it into words I wouldn't be ashamed to leave on the page.
This went on, day after day. Well — not quite day after day. I fairly quickly stopped sitting down to write every single day, because twenty minutes of a blank screen, a few times running, is enough to kill your appetite for doing it a fourth time. But every few days I'd come back and try again. And again, nothing.
My first thought, of course, was that something was wrong with me. Maybe I'd written myself out after the first book. Maybe the second book shouldn't have been started at all, and everything I'd taken for inspiration had just been a fluke that wasn't going to happen twice. I turned those thoughts over honestly, and none of them made me feel any better.
What did I do during all this? Nothing heroic. I didn't force myself to write through it — I tried a couple of times, and what came out was so lifeless I deleted it the next day. I didn't set myself a strict schedule or make any "starting Monday" promises. I just backed off myself. I filled the time with things that didn't ask for the same kind of energy — housework, social media, ordinary life with three sons, where there's no room to be bored to begin with. Sometimes I'd open the document, reread what I'd already written, close it, and go do something else.
I told my husband honestly, at one point: "I don't think I can write anymore." He didn't try to comfort me with the usual line about inspiration always coming back. He just said that if it wasn't coming, then it wasn't time yet — and that didn't erase the fact that I'd already written one whole book, and that wasn't going anywhere.
The block passed on its own. Not in a single day — more that I noticed, after the fact, that I'd been writing without a break for a week already and couldn't say exactly when I'd started again. No lightning bolt, no particular date. At some point the blank screen just stopped being blank.
Looking back now, I think I needed that period just as much as I needed the months when the words came easily. Something in me was apparently filling back up — experience, maybe, or just plain exhaustion working itself out. I don't know the exact mechanism, and honestly, I don't much care to. What matters more is that I didn't break myself trying to force it, and the book didn't suffer for it. If anything, it might be better for it — because I finished it as someone who'd taken something out of that pause, not the same person who'd walked into it.
Now, working on the third book, a few empty days don't scare me anymore. I know it doesn't mean it's over. It might mean anything — or nothing at all. And I wouldn't have that calm if I hadn't gone through that first, most frightening block, back when I didn't yet know it would ever end.