Last year, I stopped writing a novel. And it led to the most fertile period of creativity I’d ever had.
The piece had started as a short story; my writing group encouraged me to take it further. “This should totally be a novel!” they said. So, I dove in. Cue all the fun, frustration, and bewilderment that any new novelist feels. I was excited and committed to seeing it through…or so I thought.
It was a story best classified as upmarket women’s fiction with a spicy edge. (Maybe I’ll tell you about it someday.) I worked out all the beats. My main character’s transformation story was structured to keep the reader turning the page. The setting was a fun, sexy, and appealing place for the plot and characters to develop. The story would deal with some tricky relationship issues, but it would also take the reader on a wild ride.
I invested a lot of time and creative energy into the first few chapters, as well as into the highly detailed and structured outline that I was working from. But after a few months, the magic disappeared. It felt like I had poured all my creative juice into the outline – and writing the actual story was a boring, mechanic slog. Each scene gave me resistance, like a boulder in my path. Revisiting the draft and trying to make progress got harder and harder. One day, I couldn’t even bring myself to open the file.
That neglected novel, solidified in the logic of its formal outline, sat on my creativity like a hunk of marble. I could see the finished story, but the work of uncovering it – of writing it – felt impossible.
I had a minor existential crisis. Did I really want to write the damn thing? Or did I just want to have written it? Was this writer’s block? Did this happen to all writers? Is this what it feels like to write a novel, and I just can’t hack it? Could I even call myself a writer?
If you’ve been hit by this feeling, you know the despair and the confusion.
Thankfully, I was able to turn to my writing group – friends who were understanding and supportive, and who asked me some insightful questions. At one meeting, we did a writing prompt exercise, which I initially resisted. Once I leaned into the challenge, it lit up my creativity with a boom and opened new pathways I had been ignoring.
In the days and weeks that followed, I dove back into old short stories and poems that I had left behind while focusing on my novel. I made up prompts and challenges that got me back into a daily(ish) writing habit. I experienced the particular joy of writing towards an unknown ending, of riffing words off each other to express emotion or paint a picture, of using language to explore a concept. I played, I experimented. I outright giggled while I was writing. I participated in – and led – focused writing sessions with other people trying to get their creativity back. I volunteered as a submissions reader for an online magazine.
My writing didn’t feel like a static hunk of rock anymore. My creative tectonic plates were shifting, with worlds and landforms exploding into existence. I finished stories that had been sitting around for years and started new ones. I began submitting pieces to lit mags and journals. Some have even been published.
At some point in this period of seismic creative recovery, I realized that writing a novel wasn’t the only way to be a writer. Writing short stories, drabbles, poems, and essays is just as valid. (Duh, right?) Every writer has their own unique path, one that feels right and rewarding. And I needed to start following my own.
Writing isn’t easy. It can sometimes feel like trying to get blood from a stone, but it shouldn’t always feel like that. There has to be joy there too. Otherwise, what’s the point? I made peace with the novel I had attempted, neglected, and abandoned. Maybe someday I’ll return to it. As I’ve said in another essay, ideas don’t go bad. The beginnings of my novel and the outline will still be there if and when I feel ready to come back to it.
Au revoir doesn’t mean good-bye forever. It means until we see each other again.
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Maria Hypponen 