![]() ![]() If you love the work of Dickens, don’t hesitate to start your own sweeping epic. This challenge opens the door of the writer’s imagination. But I prefer the advice: Write what you like to read. I’ve done this myself, and there are many amazing novels and short stories that spring from the writer’s personal experience. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with anchoring your fiction in your own history. The best choice for someone else might be to commit to taking three months off from writing, to remove that daily failure from showing up at your desk with no energy or bandwidth. That way I keep my head above water, and still have time to focus on what needs to be focused on. I get depressed when I don’t write, so during challenging life stretches, I find the best course for me is to commit to writing for only five minutes a day. In these instances, please don’t beat yourself up, and take a break if that’s what’s best for you. If your life is draining your battery, it’s understandable that you don’t feel capable of writing your best work. ![]() Life can be hard, and solving problems in a narrative can be hard too. ![]() What I do believe in are the many legitimate issues that can make writing difficult: depression, anxiety, fear of failure, a story problem that feels unfixable, self-doubt, exhaustion, full-time “real” jobs that vacuum up all of your time and attention, not being able to afford childcare, caring for an aging parent, etc. I don’t believe in what’s commonly described as writer’s block, in which a writer sits down to write and finds themselves unable to. Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful is available now from Dial Press, so we asked her a few questions about her writing process, advice she might give to young writers, and what she might be doing if she weren’t writing. ![]()
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