I knew this would happen! Just as I found myself getting back into a regular writing practice, I dropped the ball. The class I was teaching came into the final week. I busied myself by prepping for the last session and stopped working on my own writing. Then the class ended. A few days passed. I still wasn’t writing. I mean, yes, I have other big stuff going on right now (moving house, *lots* of school-at-home days) but I had been maintaining pretty well.

When this happens, I often just feel like a failure and give up. But this time, I’ve been investigating. Trying to figure out what’s going on. I had been chugging along on my YA novel draft, and now…crickets. Why?

By asking myself what was different, I separated the idea of me-the-writer from the writing work that was coming out (or not) on the page. And guess what? The problem wasn’t me. It was the scene.

I realized I was in the middle of a scene that didn’t feel right. I was already thinking it might need to be changed or cut in the next draft. But I was already there. So, what to do?

This morning I made the choice to forge ahead. I’ll worry about revising once I get a complete draft finished, and not before. Since I was already into this scene, I wrote a little encouraging note to myself: get out of there. I figured out how to quickly extricate my characters and now I’m moving on. I wrote over 600 words this morning. Onward!