Writer's Block and My First Novel

My Civil War novel was the first book I was able to write after four months of writer's block.

Yes, that writer's block.

The type of block where you sit down and start to write something, but it doesn't sound right, and so you go back and delete, write something different, only to go back and do the same thing again. Yeah, I did that for four months before I was able to start on my first novel, which is up to 615 personally replied to rejections.

The funny thing though, is that I thought up the characters long before I thought up the story that encompasses them. I knew I wanted the main character to be a teenager; by the time I had the first three chapters written, I knew that I wanted the two sisters- the mother and the aunt- to be sort of the representations of the War Between the States. While the spy is thrown into the real Civil War, the main character in the present is enduring her own Civil War, watching her aunt and mother go at each others' throats during the stress of dealing with their mother's funeral.

The family was the easiest to create, but the storyline hooked me on the fence more than once. At times, chapters would be easy to write, but then they'd get harder and hrader to comprehend and even harder to write down because they never sounded right. Particularly the chapters in the middle of the book.

The easiest to write, surprisingly, was the ending. Not just the ending of the spy, but the ending of the book in general. Once I'd gotten past the middle, the last few chapters flowed quickly onto the page, maybe because it was the end, or maybe because the whole story finally had an ending.

Either way, writer's block is no longer a problem for me. At least for now.

~ Bridget Aine