Barbara Dee is the author of 14 middle grade novels, including Violets Are Blue and Maybe He Just Likes You . In her essay for PW , Dee reflects on her creative process and her forthcoming book, Unstuck , about a girl who struggles with anxiety and writer’s block. Every writer knows the feeling: you’re sitting at the computer, or your writing notebook, staring at the same blank page as the day before, and the day before that. So you force yourself to write a sentence, but it’s terrible, so you delete it. Then you write a single word and delete that too. Now your head is buzzing and your heart is racing. You’re starting to panic, because what if you never write anything again? For me that sort of paralysis—writer’s block, to use the technical term—came as I was writing my second book. My debut middle grade novel had done reasonably well; PW had even given it a star! So I told myself that my next MG should be bigger, more literary, more ambitious. To make a mental break with my debut, I decided to switch from the first person to the third. And, to give the story intellectual heft, I buried myself in research, reading book after book about all sorts of esoteric topics: secret codes, the Enigma machine, decoding Mayan hieroglyphics, amphibian ecosystems. The more I read, the more I realized how much I needed to know before I could even think about starting my story. And now, as I was finally ready to write… nothing. One day my son asked me what my book was about. I launched into a description of all my research. He blinked at me. “Okay,” he said. “But what’s it about?” I couldn’t answer that question. All I knew by that point was that I felt like a complete imposter. But then it hit me: I should use that —the feeling of being an imposter, a fake writer, convinced I had no real talent—as the way to connect to my main character, and to her story. So while I did […]
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