I love having friends who write. We don’t always write similar things- one of my friends is querying for fantasy right now, one is working on a sci-fi book of sorts, one writes poetry, and one is in the middle of writing this really amazing Marvel fanfiction. They’re all amazing writers and have wonderful writing styles, so I enjoy reading their works no matter what genre they are. And I enjoy talking about writing with them maybe even more.

I had no idea how many other teen writers there were until I started talking about writing, but it was crazy once I knew! I’ve had “writing days” with them where we literally just biked to the library and wrote, or we’ve talked about character development and writer’s block for hours, on top of all the other fun stuff we do. My “writer friends” aren’t just writers- they are my friends as well, and writing isn’t what defines any of us. It’s just one thing we all love doing, among many other things.

It’s wonderful being able to get advice from them, and sometimes I give advice, even though I’m fairly inexperienced and clueless. And one of my friends gave me some really good advice the other day. I was telling her about how I had really bad writer’s block, how I was bored with my story and just wanted to be done writing it. I’m getting close to the end of Pioneered and had recently had an idea for a new story, and I wasn’t quite sure how Pioneered was going to wrap up. I just wanted it to be over!

What my friend told me was, write what you love. If you don’t like your current book, hurry up and get done with it. Take a weekend, stay up until 1 am, get it over with. Or take a break and write something else. Or find a way to love it.

So I decided to just try to finish, and I ended up finding a way to love what I was writing in the moment as well.

I wrote a really crappy chapter. It was boring and it wasn’t going anywhere. My issue was that Pioneered switches between my two main characters, Jace and Twix. It was Jace’s chapter, but he wasn’t really up to anything. Colonized was a little different, because the two characters were always together, so I could pick up the end of the chapter with the next character with no problem. But the geographic separation of the two in Pioneered meant that I couldn’t do that. I essentially had two storylines going on, and while I really just wanted to write one of them, I was stuck writing the other as well.

But I decided to go ahead and write Jace’s chapter and change up my plans a little bit, and I ended up really liking the chapter I wrote. And its conclusion made me happy. There’s still unresolved stuff, so I probably have about two or three more chapters to go, but I’m at a word count that I’m pleased with, and I’m getting so close to finishing. I wrote what I loved, and that made it easier to continue writing what I love.

Sometimes, when you feel stuck, you just have to change something. You just have to take a chance and see where it goes. Sometimes plans change, and that can be the really exciting part of writing. I don’t always know where my story is going to end up when I start writing, so I get to experience that uncertainty just as my readers will, just as my characters do.

I had block because I was trying to write something I didn’t care about. But writing should be fun. It’s something I choose to do, not something I have to do. That was the mindset I needed to change, and writing something I loved help me to do that.