September 27, 2005
I gave a Rotary Club talk last week and one of the questions afterward was, "Do you ever get writer's block?"
I said, "For nonfiction? No. It's my job."

That's not 100% true. Certainly I procrastinate if there's something about the article that I don't want to work on. And some articles just seem to require you to grind them out, a kind of, "you will sit your ass down in the chair and write a draft of this piece of crap so you can re-write it tomorrow and turn it in no matter what," kind of thing. That puts the "labor" in Labor of Love, believe me. And I find it interesting that when I look at the piece later I really can't see where it's any worse than anything else I've written. The skills are there...

And I do find that I'm going through a mini-slump at the moment in terms of nonfiction in terms of my mental attitude. I still enjoy it, and I still find it rewarding and it's still something I love to do and it's going quite well, but... I actually suspect part of the mood is because my kids are back in school with the resultant homework business, school activity business, guitar lesson business, etc, and the fact that fall is definitely here, the weather is colder, rainier, and the days are definitely shorter. I've always been affected by that--seasonal affective disorder--and whenever my wife says, (usually because she wants to get as far away as possible from her parents and sisters), "Let's move to Alaska," I fix her with an annoyed look and say, "Gee, months of no sunshine at all. Sounds great!"

Ah well. Now, as for fiction...

No, no real writer's block ... except ... increasingly I will have writer's block directly associated to marketing potential. I've had enough novels rejected and only a smaller portion accepted, that it is a feedback loop. In other words, this is the type of book that sells, so write that type of book. But I might have ideas for a different type, and at the moment probably have time to write one, and I said, "I'd like to write that." And my brain says, "But what if it doesn't sell? What if Irene doesn't like it? Why waste the time?" And I spend a lot of time going over the 3 or 4 ideas in my head worrying about which one is most commercial rather than which one excites me the most or that I want to spend a year doing. It's a ways off, probably. I expect to be finished with a draft of Angels Falling by the end of October or November, and with any luck I'll be hard at work on a nonfiction book proposal. I want to give Angels a good chunk of time off before I re-write, so I'd like to work on a novel, something maybe a little different than what I've done before, but that "are you going to be able to sell it?" thing keeps popping into my head. And that's writer's block for me.

Best,
Mark Terry