Every now and again it pays to go back and start again. Here's to deleting a 30k word count.

I read an article a long time ago where it was claimed there was no such thing as writer’s block. If the pen stopped moving or if the keys stopped clicking, all you had to do was push on regardless and fix it in the re-write. Nobody ever gets to see the first draft, it was said.

Which I suppose is true. Nobody beyond yourself, and perhaps a select group of friends, will ever know if the first draft sucked or how many well imagined scenes you elected to omit. That’s the way it goes. That’s the process of writing. The closest analogy I can find is to say writing, fiction writing at least, is like fumbling your way through the dark until you eventually find the flashlight.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the screen recently; waiting for the moment the words began to flow again. I half expected this to happen somewhere between my second and third cup of coffee, because history has proven that’s how it occasionally happens. Except when it didn’t happen at all this time … well … let’s just say there was a long period of mourning for my muse.

I was thirty-some-thousand words into what I thought was a great story when the words dried up. I couldn’t understand it. Why? I had the characters. I had the plot. So why weren’t the words coming?

Oh, sure, I tried to forge my way through nonetheless, but I only ever ended up deleting what I’d written back to the point the muse had dried.

I discovered a day or so later that I wasn’t suffering from writers block.

What I discovered was that I’d introduced various elements which, simply, didn’t need to be introduced. As a consequence I began trying to steer my characters towards things they didn’t want any association with. And no matter how hard I tried, it just wasn’t happening.

Sometimes what we perceive as writers block is writers block at all. Sometimes it’s the characters in your story that have finally come to life. They know where they want to go. They know what they want you to see. And they sure as hell know where they don’t want to go.

Every once in a while you have to take a step back and unpick things.

And that’s how I came to delete some thirty thousand words.

I’ve done it once before on another (unpublished) story I wrote called Season of the wolf. In that particular instance I realized the story wasn’t working as well as I’d hoped because I’d picked a character who’s voice wasn’t particularly interesting to me as a reader, but his son’s voice was. At that point I began stripping it back to the bare bones until it worked again, and I never looked back.

Sometimes what we lament about being writers block, occasionally, turns out to be something different. And if you listen to the voices on the page long enough, they’ll show you the way. They always do.

Thanks for reading.

Saul Hudson.