Yeah, that’s right. I got stuck. Hit a wall.

It was making me crazy. I knew where I wanted the plot to go, but couldn’t figure out how to bridge the gap from where they were to where they were going. It just wasn’t coming. My brain felt like it was turning to mush from the constant battering of “How?” and I was ready to put a fork in my ear and dig it out.

So I got up and I walked around and I watched a little TV and I sang and I drank some tea and I tried again. I was determined. I just kept writing. It was complete crap, it made no sense, and it took the plot nowhere, but I kept on writing.

I went off on a wild tangent that was completely ridiculous but I wrote it anyway. And guess what? I got up to refill my tea, came back, cut a lot of it out, simplified it way down and it worked. I worried that it was too simple, but once it started flowing, I realized I needed to keep it simple to build naturally to a bigger reveal at the end of the chapter.

And I wouldn’t have gotten there if I hadn’t kept on writing, cursing myself the whole time.

So there’s my lesson – the most simple and astute lesson any author needs to learn: Just keep writing. Just do it. Push through, write it out, fix it later.

Oh, and don’t put a fork in your ear. I don’t recommend that.