The Characters Are Still Knocking

Why some stories refuse to let go, even when life leaves little room for them

Yesterday was a balmy 68-degree day in North Carolina.

In the morning, after coming back from the gym, taking a quick shower, and sneaking a peek at Slack to gauge how the day was going at work, I got back in the car to take my daughter to school so she could take the final exam for one of her classes. Then I sat there in the parking lot, waiting for her, with a lot of time on my hands.

I resisted the urge to go back to Slack and pulled out my faithful Kindle Paperwhite (11th generation, 32GB, if you’re interested) and dove right into one of the three books I’m reading at the moment, but something kept bugging me, begging for my attention. I still pressed on for a few chapters until I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was reading the same line over and over and not really paying attention to what I was reading.

You may not know that I’ve written and published three books, and lately I’ve been thinking especially about the second one. It was a young adult novel that I brought to life using real experiences from my own childhood growing up in a small beach town. I wanted to share parts of that world that might not be familiar to most people, like harvesting car emblems just for fun. But more than that, it was a story about true friendship.

Either way, I’m not going to talk about the plot itself or what the book is about, but about the process, and that is what really got me to put my Kindle down. I remembered that throughout the early phase of writing that book, which took me less than three months to finish, I always followed a pattern: finding a clear, bright place to sit down with either my laptop or my iPad and an external keyboard. I would play music not too loud, but just loud enough to get my creativity going, and I would just start typing away. I averaged about 3,000 to 4,000 words every day.

Like I said, it took me three months, but that was mostly because there was one specific chapter about one character that stumped me. It took me about a month just to figure out how to write him. Once I got past that writer’s block, things were pretty okay for me. As the cliché goes, the characters took over, and the story pretty much wrote itself.

Since then, I think it’s been more than a year and a half since I published a book. I’ve started three other books, one of them with a considerable amount already written, about 10 or 11 chapters finished. I know exactly where I want that story to go. I can see very clearly how I want things to play out, but now I’m struggling not only to find the motivation, but even to get in the mood to write.

Usually, the mornings, when I feel most creative, have been spent dealing with the work that pays the bills. I know I’ve given this advice to other people in the past, and it seems to be the most common advice: if you want to write, you should just write—no matter when, no matter how many words you actually produce, just keep writing. And yet I struggle to follow that advice myself.

If you ever read any of those books written by people trying to tell you how they did it, how they became bestselling authors, including that famous book by Ray Bradbury, you will hear that a lot of people like to wake up one hour earlier than usual or maybe carve out part of their lunch break at work just to write.

I’ve done it, and I’ve tried it, and it definitely works, but for me, in order to really write and put the words down the way I want to, I need to have music playing. It has to be in the morning. I have to be in a brightly lit place. And I just haven’t been able to find the opportunity to do it, or maybe a fairer statement would be that I haven’t prioritized creating those opportunities so that I can write.

Either way, as I sat there in that parking lot thinking about all these things, I knew that I had two books waiting for me, including a very long story that started out as just a standalone piece about an event involving some of the characters from my second book, but that eventually took off and became something bigger. It might even be a sequel.

I have all these ideas and all of these writing projects waiting for me, and I still haven’t prioritized the time to write. All I know is that I do feel sometimes that these are stories that want to be told, and that some of these characters are pushing from the inside, rattling their cups against the bars of their cells, trying to get my attention so they can be emancipated and given a chance to see the light of day.

I need to figure out how to do this, but I know I won’t be able to until I can get my work and personal life balanced enough that I won’t be distracted by everything else. And I guess this is the crux of my problem. The scary part? I think I know what the answer is, the thing that could resolve my problem. But I can’t even say it out loud to myself; that’s how life-changing it could be.

Send your positive thoughts, energy, and likes my way. I could use the vibe.