I missed this interview going up! I was Project Fiction’s September Author of the Month, and they included my biography, an excerpt from The Aphorisms of Kherishdar, and then the interview:
Do you have any suggestions for people that get writer’s block? What do you do to overcome it?
There are a lot of ways of dealing with block, and at one time or another in my life I might have said “practice,” or “keep lists of ideas for when you’ve run out of them.” These days I suspect my answer is less concrete. When I run into writer’s block, it’s usually a sign that this isn’t the right story for me at the right time. It might later be the right story—the novel I just finished was one I started two years earlier and set aside—but it’s not the story now.
Now is important. There is something Right Now that you are passionate about—passionately terrifed of, passionately in love with, passionately angry at—and that’s the thing you should be writing about. Nowadays when I don’t want to write, I suspect that the thing I’m passionate about is frightening me into avoidance. So with some gentleness and understanding, I have to remind myself that being frightened is okay, and try to work past it to get to the thing that Now wants me to deal with. And if the thing that’s frightening me is legitimately too much for me that day, then Now and I agree to work on other things that might prepare me for it.
I make a pact with Now, that I will come back to what it wants if I can’t handle it at the time. That seems to work well for me.
Here’s the interview in its entirety.
