This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 21: How To Defeat Writer’s Block.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am your host, Sarah Werner.

And the topic for today’s episode was suggested to me by a podcast listener, Andrew Coons, who wrote on the Write Now podcast Facebook page, episode, topic idea, writing drills and or exercises to help stay sharp or break through writer’s block.

Andrew that is a great idea. Writer’s block is one of those very private writer things that has somehow leaked out into the mainstream world. So if I’m at work and I’m supposed to be writing something, and my boss says, “Sarah, why haven’t you written this yet?” And I replied, “Oh, I have writer’s block.” Chances are my boss would understand what that was and respond with at least some little bit of sympathy.

Even people who know very, very little about writing or the creative process seem to understand or acknowledge the existence of writer’s block. And I don’t know if it’s because it’s such a universal thing that has tormented so many writers that it’s just become part of the public consciousness, or if it’s because human beings as a species are at heart creators. And we understand the frustration of being unable for whatever reason, to create, to paint, to sing, to write, to do whatever it is that you were made to do.

Before we get to the things that I do know today, I’d like to first sketch out a couple of things that I don’t know. First of all, I don’t know if writer’s block feels the same to everybody who experiences it. It may be universal in its experience or simply in its existence, but while it is universal, I’m not 100% percent sure how deeply the universalism goes.

What I’m saying is it might be a matter of taste. Say, I love chocolate and I do, but I have a friend who can’t stand the taste of chocolate. What then does that say about the nature of chocolate? Is it inherently delicious or inherently disgusting? Well, it’s a matter of perception. The same might be true of writer’s block. It exists like chocolate exists, but it may taste different to different people based on their perceptions, their experiences, and just how they deal with things and how they write.

The second thing I want to say about writer’s block is that I’m not 100% sure it has happened to every single writer who has ever lived. When I talk about writer’s block being a kind of universal, I mean that in a broader sense. I don’t mean to say or guarantee that every single writer ever has experienced it, because if you’re a writer who hasn’t experienced it, well, first of all, you are very lucky.

And second of all, you’re still a writer. If you are a writer or if you desperately want to be a writer, but you’ve never experienced writer’s block, that doesn’t exclude you from the writer’s club, you’re still in. Some writers, maybe including myself, might simply be a little envious of you. You’re not missing out on the full experience of being a writer, you’re not different, you’re not a freak, unless you enjoy labeling yourself as a freak, in which case label away.

But some people experience writer’s block, some people don’t. Some people experience it constantly all the time, some people experience it off and on. Some people experience it in seasons like flu season and all of that is okay. And we’re going to talk today about how to deal with it if and when writer’s block arises.

So let’s move on to the things that I do know and can say for certain, not everyone experiences writer’s block in the same way. That is to say, for some people writer’s block is the complete inability to sit down and write, for whatever reason and triggered by whatever purpose. A writer can sit down and look at a blank page or a blank screen, and simply feel nothing.

I’ve had that kind of writer’s block. I’ve also had the kind of writer’s block where you can kind of write, but it feels like everything that comes out is terrible. Oh, it’s just so bad, and you feel like you’re just throwing sticks at a brick wall. It’s just useless. I’ve had that kind of writer’s block as well. There’s writer’s block where you struggle to come up with ideas. There’s writer’s block where you couldn’t write your way out of a paper bag, let alone the really cool plot you’ve come up with.

And just as not everyone experiences writer’s block in the same way, different writers may experience writer’s block at different times within the writing process. And that’s what I want to focus on today. Writer’s block that occurs during the beginning or planning stages of a project, writer’s block that occurs in the middle, that long dreary stretch of slogging tragedy, which are just some words that I made up, but you know what I’m talking about.

And there’s also a kind of writer’s block that can come in at the end, whether it’s picking out an ending, writing the ending you had in mind well, or even struggling through the revision process. So I’m going to take us through the timeline of a very vague writing project.

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll say it’s a short story, and we’re going to take a look at the different kinds of writer’s block you might experience and how to defeat them along the way. Before we begin, I’d like to say that today’s episode topic was not only pointed out to me, but it was also inspired by a blog post that I read, oh gosh, several years ago. This blog post is called The 10 Types Of Writer’s Block And How To Overcome Them. And it was written by Charlie Jane Anders in 2011 for the science fiction blog io9.

I’ll go ahead and link to it in the show notes for today’s episode, so that you can check it out if you’d like. It’s smart and interesting and above all very genuine and helpful. So I’d encourage you to check that out. Process wise, we’re going to start at the very beginning or really rather the pre beginning. This is the type of writer’s block that stops you before you even begin.

And I think that this type of writer’s block more than anything else prevents people from becoming writers or from even realizing that they have the potential to be very fine writers. This is where you perhaps have the desire to write, but you don’t know what to write, or perhaps you sit down and you struggle with coming up with an idea. Everything is blank, the paper, the computer screen, and unfortunately, potentially your mind.

It’s been a long week and you finally have some free time. You have a cup of coffee, you have a cat in your lap and you have time and you’ve been itching to write, but you sit down and the blankness just overwhelms you. Nothing seems good enough to write about, nothing seems worthy of this free time that you’ve finally been able to set aside.

Or perhaps you’re just exhausted. You’re working a full time job or you’re going to school, or you finally got someone to watch the kids. You’re desperate not to waste this time, but you’re so exhausted you can’t see straight, or maybe you’re overwhelmed with what’s been going on throughout the week. Or maybe you’re just feeling particularly helpless. And you know how many good books are out there, and you kind of throw up your hands and say, “Oh, gosh, Harry Potter’s already been written. 50 Shades Of Grey has already been written. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy has already been written. What on earth do I think I’m doing? Who am I kidding?”

I’ve thought that sometimes too. And often the temptation to get up and just say, “Well, I’ll just go do a load of laundry and then see how I feel.” Or, “I’ll just start watching an episode of something on Netflix and then I’ll get some ideas and that’ll be awesome. And then I’ll start writing and everything will be wonderful.”

Often we stop and walk away before we’ve even begun. And we never go back. In the face of that I say, there’s a reason that you sat down in front of that blank paper or that blank computer screen. You sat down for a reason, for a purpose. And that purpose is to write, you were itching to write, you were itching to form a story.

If you get up now and occupy your time with something else, sure. It will alleviate the immediate pressure of needing to write, it will distract you, but it won’t satisfy you like writing will satisfy you. And I know it because I’ve been there. And I think that you probably know it too. So before you get up and turn on the TV, before you go and wash the dishes, give yourself a chance.

The super, super early stage of writer’s block is a really great time to try out some writing exercises. So I’ve always associated writing exercises with the things that you did in like, I don’t know, fifth and sixth grade, where you’d sit down in English class and your teacher would say, write 500 words about what you did over summer vacation, or write about your family, or for whatever reason, there was always an alien one, like, “Whoa, aliens come to earth.”

And they’re seeing everything for the first time. Describe your experience with the aliens or describe what they see with their alien eyes and what have you. For whatever reason, those never appealed to me. Those of you who’ve been listening to this podcast for a while know that initially I started writing to escape, and so rehashing the daily activities from my summer vacation, just simply wasn’t appealing.

I didn’t want to report, I wanted to create. That’s what that itch was for me. And maybe it’s the same for you. So I have a couple different writing exercises that I’d invite you to try. These worked for me, they might not work for everyone.

The first one, and this one is my favorite, and I feel the most imagination enabling writing exercise that I’ve come across was suggested to me at first by Ray Bradbury, in his lovely book, Dandelion Wine. In the introduction of his book, he talks about how he started writing and how whenever he tried to force an idea or tried to think too hard or chase down an idea, it eluded him or died. And so he learned to write by what he calls a simple word association process. And this is what I use as my own writing exercise for when my own ideas are eluding me.

Quoting from the introduction, “In my early 20s, I floundered into a word association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head. I would then take arms against the word or for it and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done.”

So what I do for this writing exercise is I get a pad of paper because I found that I brainstormed better by handwriting and a pencil, and I write one single word at the very top. This could be literally any word. It can be something from your past. It could be something from your present, it could be some randomly selected emotion or object or animal or abstract idea. Or you could even simply grab a dictionary and open it to a random page and select the first word you see. The word could be spider plant or Canary or longing or pain or foam or pink or empty bottle or a birdcage, you get the idea.

What I do is I draw a little box around the word or I circle the word and I focus on it for a couple seconds, and I just let myself get a feeling for the word, not necessarily what it looks like or how it’s spelled, but what it evokes in me, what feelings and emotions, what contexts does it bring up? What memories or what possibilities looking to the past or to the future?

This is a great exercise because you can literally do anything with it. If you’re a poet, it makes a great focus for a poem. You don’t even have to use the word, just start writing about what it evokes. If a character grows out of that, that’s awesome. If you find yourself reporting on a flashback that you have, that it causes, that’s also fine. Just start writing with that word centered in your brain and see what comes out.

Be open and be willing to be surprised. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel creative or if you don’t feel like you have any ideas or ideas that are worthwhile, all you need for this exercise are words. They don’t need to be clever, they don’t need to be strung together with astonishing grace, you just need to start writing.

You can set a time limit, whether it’s 15 minutes, an hour, whatever works for you and your schedule, or you can simply write until you run out of steam and feel satisfied with having created something. But either way, start writing.

Another writing exercise that I found useful and that I’ve talked about before is a little bit more rooted in reality. Depending on how analytical you’re willing to be about your own writer’s block, I have noticed that sometimes I sit down to write, but there’s something bothering me. There’s something scratching at the back of my brain and it’s distracting me and I can’t focus on my writing. And I can’t create when I’m unfocused. This is where a journal comes in handy.

I’ve spoken about journals before, I think in episode three and episode 12. Episode three is about writing as healing and 12 is about my eight favorite writing tools, and one of those tools is a journal. So if you’re feeling distracted, think hard about what might be distracting you and then give yourself the time and the freedom to write about it. It doesn’t have to be in a journal that you’ve had since you were seven years old and it doesn’t have to be something that you chain yourself to every day, just another obligation.

It doesn’t have to be in any kind of proper diary format. It doesn’t have to start, dear diary. It doesn’t even have to be in a journal, it can be on a poster note. It can be on a cocktail napkin, but what you need to do is process whatever it is that’s distracting you from writing, whether that’s anger with someone else, a stressful day at work, a lost account, a problem with a child or a loved one, give yourself the time and permission to process it through writing, set a timer for a maximum of 15 or 20 minutes.

And at the end of that time, put your journal away, fold your paper in half, whatever, put it aside and devote the rest of your time to writing. It just started raining and thundering here, outside my window. I podcast from my office, which is on a busy road, and right now the streets are wet and there are cars rushing up and down the road and there’s thunder rumbling. And so just take it as ambient sound, I guess. I’ll try to block it out as much as I can, but if you hear anything, it’s not my stomach grumbling, it’s thunder.

So those are two writing exercises that you can do if you find that you’re experiencing writer’s block the kind of writer’s block that will stop you before you even start, you can use the ideas that come out of the writing that you do for the writing exercise and expand upon those, or you can simply put them aside and try to brainstorm new ideas, they’ll come.

It’s also a good idea to remind yourself that any idea that you do come up with doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to have some kind of grand idea with a capital I, all hatched and ready before you start writing. You don’t have to have the kernel of the very next Harry Potter success series in hand before you begin writing.

Writing is an organic process and often the idea or series of words that you begin with will morph and change and grow as they need to and become the story that you need to tell. So in this phase, in this beginning phase, it’s important to keep an open mind and an open heart and to be willing to try.

Onto the beginning. The kind of writer’s block that I’ve experienced at the beginning when I’ve sat down and I’m ready to write, and I’m eager to write, and in fact, maybe I’m a little too eager to write because I have about 7,000 ideas that I want to write about. Like, “Oh, I want to do a novel about this.” Or, “Ooh, maybe I need to write a short series of poems about this real quick.” Or, “I have 10 different ideas for this and this and this, and they’re all just crashing and I can’t choose one. And it’s like being at the supermarket, looking at the wall of jam. Like seriously, who invented so many flavors of jam? How do you choose just one?”

What I’d like you to do if this is the case is write down all of those ideas, write them all down. If while you’re writing them down, some of them seem less awesome than you thought you can erase them or cross them out, but just get them all down and out of your head in a list, whether it’s bulleted or numbered, whatever.

If you see an idea on that list that really jumps out at you more than the other ones, then go ahead and begin writing about that idea or that topic, but don’t discard the other ideas you came up with. I have a drawer in my desk that is full of little bulleted lists of ideas, of things I’d like to write about for myself or a future podcast episodes, and just a number of other things.

I don’t throw those ideas away. I mean, unless they’re bad ideas and they deserve to be thrown away. There’s a little bit of a safety net that you can design for yourself and it can help you commit to just one idea if you know that the others are still there waiting for you one day to write them. You don’t have to throw them away and just permanently choose one idea. You have the freedom to go back to that list at any time you like and write about any of those ideas.

I think the middle is where a lot of writers simply stop, they trail off, they get frustrated or bored or tired or angry, and they lose their momentum. For me, the most common type of writer’s block is simply getting stuck. So if you’re the kind of person who writes outlines, maybe you’ve strayed too far from your outline to know what happens next, or maybe you aren’t an outline person and you’re just simply lost.

Or maybe you’ve stuck too close to your outline and it’s not really working out in the way that you thought it would. In response to this type of writer’s block, I would suggest that you go back and listen to episode 13, which is called How To Write Yourself Out Of A Corner. And in which I list a seven step process for getting your writing back on track.

In episode 13, I outline seven different methods that you can use to get unstuck, from throwing a weird twist in there and seeing what happens to re-examining your characters and their motivations, to meditating, to sleeping on it, and more. I hope that you find something there that will help you get unstuck.

Aside from not knowing what to write next or what happens next, there’s the chance that you might become bored with your novel or your short story or your poem, or what have you. The beginning is always fun and exciting. You’re exploring something new and you’re building something new and you’re experiencing something new, and then it starts to maybe get a little stale.

You get restless, you get bored, you can’t stand the thought of opening up your notebook where you’re writing it or opening up the file on your computer where it’s saved. You can’t face it. You don’t want to face it. You’re tired of it, and you hate it. There are a couple of different things you can do here to combat the boredom, it just depends on how introspective and honest you’re willing to be with yourself.

First off, you could make it interesting, kill off a character, do something truly unexpected. If you’re like me and you write to escape, you also, I think are writing to entertain yourself. I don’t remember who said it, but there’s a quote that says, ‘A writer is a novel’s first reader too’. And if the writer is bored, then the reader is inevitably going to be bored. So think hard about what you like to read. Think about, what’s interesting to you.

Ask yourself, what is the most interesting thing that could happen next? Not the coolest or the most heroic or the best, but what is the most interesting thing that can happen next? Start thinking along that line and you’ll probably get something really good. In an earlier episode of my podcast, episode eight, I talk about what to do if instead of being bored, maybe you just don’t feel like writing.

If that’s the case, you can go back and listen to episode eight or and this isn’t necessarily advice that you’d probably hear from many people, but if you’re going through a lot right now, and you’re too exhausted or depressed, or what have you to sit down and write, then sometimes it can be okay to take a break, to give yourself permission, to take a day off from writing or a week off from writing or a season off from writing.

If that sounds like a relief to you, then it probably means you need to take a short break, do commit to coming back to it though. I can’t stress how important that is. It’s so easy for us to drop something that we truly love and enjoy doing. And for whatever reason to never go back to it again. I went a couple of years without writing anything, you forget that it’s important to you and you forget that it’s satisfying and fulfilling and the very thing that you were made to do.

So if you are going to take a break, don’t let yourself forget that, hold yourself accountable, whether it’s by a calendar or an associate or a friend or a mentor who will hold you accountable. Whatever you choose by all means, take a break, but commit to coming back and finishing what you started.

Another type of writer’s block that can plague you in the middle of a work, or really at any phase is being paralyzed by fear. Fear isn’t always bad, fear can be healthy. My cat Momo, well, technically my husband Tim’s cat Momo is about a year old and he has three legs and he is completely fearless. Sometimes that’s good because it lets him explore and discover things and it gives him the courage to get along even on three legs, but it can also get him in trouble, when he doesn’t know that something is potentially bad for him, like running out into traffic or touching his paw to a burner on the stove. So fear can be good, it can keep us safe and in control of our lives.

However, fear can also be extremely debilitating and harmful. I talked about fear briefly in my very first episode, the one with the terrible audio quality, because I didn’t really know what I was doing and I was like, “I’m just going to talk about stuff into this microphone.” And it turned out so quiet you can barely hear it. But in that first episode, I talk about fear and how it can prevent you from writing at all.

Fear is one of those things that if you let a little of it in and you don’t know how to deal with it properly, or you can’t deal with it properly, it can stay inside you and grow and fester and take you along this really awful whirlwind ride that’s very difficult to escape from. If you’re afraid, afraid to begin or afraid to continue or afraid to move past a certain point in what you’re writing, listen to episode number five, it’s called How To Regain Lost Confidence. And it will help coach you out of the fear, and back into a place where you’re comfortable moving forward with whatever you’re writing.

Finally, writer’s block near the end of a project. As I mentioned before, this could be, I don’t know how to end my piece, or I kind of know how I want it to end, but the words just aren’t coming out right. It doesn’t sound right or it doesn’t fit. Unfortunately, these types of writer’s block at the very end are often the most difficult to overcome, but they can be overcome.

One of the best ways I’ve found in finishing a work is simple trial and error, and the patience and willingness to be able to write several different endings until one comes out that feels right. If you write multiple endings again, don’t crumple them up and throw them away, alleviate that anxiety by writing one out and keeping it.

So writing it on a different sheet of paper or saving it in a different file. And then if you need to, once you’ve written a couple of different endings, put it away for a while and let it stew in your mind and then a week or a month or six months or whatever, however long later, take it out again and objectively read through all of the endings and pick the one that seems right for you.

Finally, revision purgatory. This is when you’ve completed your work. And you’re looking at this stack of poems or this 15,000 page novel that you’ve written and you’re going through it and you’re finding so many plot holes and errors and inconsistencies and just shoddy language. And you begin to think, there’s no way that I could ever fix this mess.

I have 15,000 pages of mess, and I know it’s tempting to want to give up, but you’ve worked so hard. You’ve overcome all these other stages of writer’s block and you cannot stop now. So here are a few things you can do. Number one, take it in chunks or chapters, baby steps. You don’t have to do the whole thing, you don’t have to edit that whole thing in one day or one week. I mean, unless you’re on a deadline, in which case maybe you do.

But commit to editing five pages a day or a chapter a week or a chapter a month, take it slow, take good notes while you’re doing it. Remember that she’s wearing a blue skirt on page 34, but later it’s referred to an orange skirt on page 163, keep good notes and be patient. And it’ll be well worth it. If you’re going through this thing and it’s more of a mess. If it’s a garbage pit of despair and horribleness, I’ve been there too.

You look at this thing that you’ve poured your heart and soul and time and energy into and you’re like, “This is worthless and useless. I’ve created something terrible. I’ve created a monster.” Then what you can do if you don’t think that it can be edited down into a coherent narrative or a sensical poem or a linear biography or whatever it is you’re writing, use that as your first draft.

So don’t edit and fix and Polish it, but rather keep it at your side, as you begin to retype the whole thing, fixing the things that need fixing as you go. Create a second draft. This is time consuming and often not fun, and it also leaves you open to all of the different types of writer’s block that you’ve already overcome. But sometimes if you just need to recapture the flow or the narrative thread then creating a second draft can often be your best chance at finishing your work.

So if you’ve ever faced a type of writer’s block that I haven’t addressed here, I would love to hear about it. And either what you did about it or what you didn’t do about it, or what you still need help with. You can go ahead and email me at hello@sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Or you can navigate to my website, which I won’t spell out for you again and go to my contact page and there’s this nice little form that’ll ask you for your name, your email address, and then a message of whatever length you’d prefer to send to me.

So I really look forward to hearing about your own trials and struggles and hopefully triumphs over writer’s block. What I do want you to take away about writer’s block is that you’re not alone. More importantly, you are not a failure.

If you sit down and you feel like you’re unable to write, or if you sit down and you frivol away the time on the internet or on Netflix, you’re not a failure, you’re still a writer and you still have a story to tell. It’s okay to have off days, just like we love those days, and we have those days where we’re in the zone and everything’s awesome and we’re just writing and everything is right with the world. There are those days as well, where everything is just wrong. Your words are clunky and there’s no flow and your characters fall flat. That’s okay.

Do a writing exercise, figure out what type of writer’s block you have and try combating it. Just know that you are not a failure. You are a writer and as most, if not all writers will tell you, writing is hard work and writer’s block can be part of what makes it hard, but I have faith in you. I do, I believe in you. I want to read what you’ve written and the world wants to read what you’ve written, and maybe the world needs to hear what you have to say, and I truly hope that you say it.

In addition to the idea for this week’s podcast episode topic, I also received a very good question from podcast listener, Brian. Brian asks, “Would you recommend having two separate social media accounts, one for your writing professional self and another for everything else? I’m especially interested in Twitter, but I wonder if this would apply to other services as well. I’d love to have everything together I suppose, but I could see a good reason to keep writing contacts in a separate space and possibly not subject them to posts about video games, craft beer, and whatnot. Thanks. Hope your day is going well. Brian.”

Brian, that is a great question. I work in online marketing and website development. And so this is a question that I get a lot actually, and it’s one that I’ve had to struggle with myself. So when I had to make this choice, I think I had about 700 followers on Twitter, and I was launching my podcast and I was like, “Oh, should I start a separate podcast Twitter feed?”

For me at that time, it didn’t make sense to abandon the 700 followers that I’d had because it takes a lot of work to accumulate followers. It’s a lot of hard work, and a lot of the people I followed and who followed me on Twitter at least were interested in books and reading, and it seemed like a good fit. So take a look at who is following you and take a look at what you want to tweet about.

It’s really hard work to build a second audience, or to rebuild an audience on a separate social media account. So with that in mind, it’s also a ton of work to post to two different accounts, and usually what we see is one account will become sort of the main account and the other accounts will die off, because you begin focusing your energy on one of them.

So I would recommend just having the one account, unless here’s the exception. If you think of yourself as a persona. So, oh, I’m Sarah, the podcaster or Sarah, the writer. If you have one persona, but you also maybe have been tweeting from a very different persona. Like Sarah, the person who makes very foul jokes or Sarah, the person who swears a lot, that is something to take in consideration.

And with that example, Sarah, the podcaster, you know my podcast is family friendly, I don’t swear. I make sure that it’s appropriate. If my existing Twitter account for personal Sarah, is just full of crass jokes and swearing, then yes, I would separate those out.

But if your persona is consistent, then I would simply keep one Twitter profile. And the same is true of Facebook pages, Google Plus, unless one of them is going to be a business outside of yourself. If you’re doing this for what we call personal branding, so branding yourself as an author or writer, it’s healthy just to have the one focused on you.

Again, unless you’d like a separate private account where you’re making crass jokes with your friends. Now, if you want to go for more corporate brand. And so if you have say, your personal Sarah Werner accounts, but then you start up something that’s branded like, Oh, you know this podcast, or if you run a kickboxing studio as a side business, or if you have a retail shop, then I would keep those two separate.

But I think that people like to see behind the scenes with a writer. If you follow any writers online, and I know I follow a lot of writers on Twitter. For me, tweets about writing are just as interesting coming from them as are tweets about craft beer or about their feelings on cats or their latest gardening exploits. Because when you follow a writer, you’re genuinely interested in that writer and what kind of things drive them to write the things that they do.

So as a writer, I would say just one Twitter profile is probably the best idea. Brian, that was a great question and thank you for asking it.

Special thanks in creating today’s episode go to a lot of really awesome people, especially Andrew Coons, who suggested the topic for today’s episode and to podcast listener Brian for his awesome question, as well as to Charlie Jane Anders, who wrote such a genuine and heartfelt blog post about writer’s block that I still refer to, to this day.

I’d also like to thank my Patreon supporters for their generosity in helping me to cover hosting costs and just all sorts of other things. Because of you, I’m able to keep doing this and I appreciate it so much. Special thanks go out to official podcast caffeinator Rebecca Werner, official rad dude Andrew Coons, and official cool cat Sean Locke. Once again, you are all amazing, and I thank you so much from the bottom of my heart.

If you would like to contribute to the Write Now podcast, you can do so from my website, there is a link that says help support this podcast. And it will take you to a donation platform called Patreon, where you can give a dollar an episode, a million dollars an episode, 50 cents an episode, whatever you feel is right for you.

Finally, I would like to thank Hendo for just being constantly supportive and encouraging about all things podcast related. I’d like to thank my mastermind group, which includes Peter Aadahl, who runs the 168 opportunities podcast and to Ron Gibson. You guys are smart and wonderful and you help keep me on track, so thank you.

I’d also like to thank my husband, Tim. Tim, you’re a pretty great guy. Thanks for clearing out of the house while I podcast, it really means a lot to me. You can hear the cars going by outside and the thunder.

In any case, most of all, thank you for listening. I really hope that this podcast has been a good influence in your life and on your writing. I would love to hear about your writing projects if you’d like to email me or message me through my website, please do keep in touch and let me know how things are going. And I don’t know if you can hear it, but the thunder is getting progressively louder and I’m kind of afraid that our electricity is going to go out, so I might end this episode here.

In the meantime, I encourage you break through that writer’s block. It doesn’t have any more control over you than you let it. You’re not a failure. You’re not alone. Writing is hard and full of challenges, but part of the satisfaction of having written something is having overcome those challenges and hardships. And I know that you can do it.

This has been the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and I am signing off before the electricity goes out. Take care.