What I’ve got is not writer’s block, but it’s impeding me all the same. Writer’s block is that dread affliction that causes a writer to sit down to work on their work-in-progress, or to begin it, if all they have is the title, the concept, and perhaps an outline…but when they put fingers to keys, they’re stymied. The words won’t come.
I have a little different problem. Never mind not knowing where to begin; I don’t even know what to write about.
I’ve written well over 100 books—and that’s not even including all those erotic romance novels I penned under a pseudonym back in 2008 and 2009 when the recession was doing a serious number on my income.
I may have run out of things to say!
It’s different for novelists. They’re not constrained by reality. All they have to do is let their imaginations take flight and dream up new plots. But I’m not really a novelist. Oh, yes, I’ve written a few novels aside from those e-roms: WHAT CHILD IS THIS; HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN; RING IN THE NEW. But I’m really not a fictioneer. Except for my picture books for kids that is. But one of my publishers sent out a notice to her authors that children’s books aren’t selling well, and while she’ll publish all that are already contracted, going forward she’ll accept only books for adults.
So—going forward I should write only for adults, it would seem, and nonfiction…but WHAT?
And there I am back at the beginning. Everything I can think of to write I’ve written already—or else it’s a topic on which I don’t have a book’s worth of things to say, or one that doesn’t interest me.
It isn’t actually writer’s block. But I’m a writer who’s blocked, all the same.