When You Hit the Writing Wall

By Glynn Young

I’ve learned there is more than one kind of writing block.

I’ve been blessed with never to have experienced writer’s block, that immobilization that often afflicts writers and stops them cold from writing another word. I’ve sympathized with people who’ve had it, and I know it’s real. They stare at a blank page or screen, and – nothing.

The sources of writer’s block are legion – stress, tension, deadlines, family tragedy, accidents, illness, writing one’s way into a dead end with no resolution, finances, success of a novel (creating high expectations for the next one), the end or beginning of a relationship, and more. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it. So did Herman Melville. So did composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Writer’s block is so well known and so well-documented that there are scores of books on the subject, classes you can take, and writing coaches who can help guide you through it.

Most writers experience it to one degree or another.

I had dodged it. For decades. I never had a problem through four years of college, graduate school, and years of working in corporate communications as (usually) a writer. I held down a more-than-full-time job while writing two novels and a non-fiction book in two years (I did veer close to physical collapse). When I say I’ve never experienced that common creative slump, I’m serious.

But there’s another kind of writer’s block, and for the time in my life, I am experiencing it.

After completing a series of five novels, I turned to a standalone story. I worked on it for a year. It’s a very different kind of story than my previous efforts. And I knew it was somewhat tricky – how a family blows up when the oldest child, a 13-year-old boy, is the subject of a hoax at school. The tricky part is that the story runs against the prevailing cultural narrative.

An agent read it and said this: “It has a fast pace. I like it. But no publishing firm I deal with would touch it.” An early reader, familiar with my novels, said this: “this just isn’t going to work. You wrote this out of anger, and you’ll offend too many people. Write something else.”

The agent’s response didn’t surprise me. The early reader’s reaction did. If I wrote the manuscript in anger, I was completely unaware of it. Did I imagine the story might offend some people? Maybe a few, but I didn’t really consider the possibility. It was the story in my head. It told a different kind of truth from both conventional wisdom and what you read in the daily newspaper or see on social media. The guiding idea was that these kind of “cancel culture” situations exact a cost, one that is often terrible.

The two reactions haven’t stopped me from writing. I even completed another fiction manuscript (and one likely to offend no one) and have sketched ideas for three other books. What’s stopped me from even thinking about any kind of publication of anything is the comment about anger. Because if I’m writing from anger, I shouldn’t be writing. That’s not what motivates a Christian writer.

It’s a different kind of writer’s block. I haven’t hit a creative wall; I’m still writing, But I’ve hit the wall of having any desire to see anything I write published. Perhaps it’s fear, or a crisis of confidence.

The creative impulse is still very much alive, but I’m writing for an audience of one, which seems almost pointless to me. But perhaps this is where I’m supposed to be for this time.

Glynn Young is a national award-winning speechwriter, communications practitioner, and novelist. He’s the author of four published novels, Dancing Priest, A Light Shining, Dancing King, and Dancing Prophet;  and Dancing Prince; and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.   Visit Glynn on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, his blog, the Dancing Priest book page, and his business website.