The Stalled Writer

An unfinished manuscript haunts a stalled writer, sapping energy that ought to go into more writing.

You started with a burst of writing motivation. You were super energized! You even perhaps had the best motivation for writing—ever!

“By gosh, this memoir is going to get written and it’s going to be good!” you tell yourself. And the writing flows for the first while. Your energy remains high. You write regularly and you think about how to make your memoir better and better. At last, you feel like you are a “real writer!”

Then, you beome a stalled writer.

A day—or two or three—goes by without any writing. Then that “not writing” repeats itself the next week.

“But that’s ok,” you tell yourself. “I’m just taking a few days off.” But…

The few days off eventually become many days off, and the memoir begins to seem a bit less interesting.

You realize you aren’t making much progress. You may even be losing the feel of what you were creating. Your commitment for writing your memoir is on the wane. You may ask yourself…

“Is this really worth my time to write?”

You have entered a dangerous path! It leads to quitting. Your motivation for writing your memoir is wavering. It is at risk of disappearing.

Don’t go down that way—at least for long!

Kinds of stalled writers

Over the years of editing and coaching, I’ve noticed that there seem to be several sorts of people who do not finish their manuscripts but remain stalled.

• Those who have been writing a good amount of text, which is accumulating without somehow coalescing into a book. The manuscript lacks dramatic arc and pacing. It is like a scarf being knitted without any sense of where it will end. So… the knitter knits and knits.
• Those who have already composed 20, 30, or even 50 or more independent stories or vignettes and these, too, are not coalescing into a book. These writers produce stand-alone pieces, which is not a bad goal to have really, but writing a series of stand-alone pieces is not what they set out to do. They are discouraged.
• Those who have written snippets, scenes, dialogues without any adding up to a story. Sometimes, these jottings form a hefty pile of papers.
• Those who are perfecting their memoir—over and over again. “I want to get it right,” they say. They can’t imagine “getting it right” and so they plod on.

Writers in these groups of stalled writers do want to make a statement about their lives as a whole—not to record in an ad hoc fashion interesting, unique and possibly weird events that may have happened to them, but a book that adds up to a portrait of their experience and they are mnot succeeding at getting there.

Help is on the available for the stalled writer.

To find help to finish writing your memoir in a satisfactory and expeditious way, go to Write to the End, and use coupon code WTTE25 to save 25%

For a YouTube video on finishing your memoir, click here.