You ever feel stuck?

Sometimes you just do. It’s a good time to eat chocolate ice cream, or go for a walk, or take a bath.

Getting unstuck is usually a combination of mental and physical, which is interesting because feeling stuck is usually entirely a mental thing.

But we’re mammals, so getting unstuck sometimes requires a little physicality. Shaking it off might be literal. Don’t overthink it, just get moving. Enjoy something. Not so much “rest” in the sense of removal from activity, but thoughtful rest in an activity you enjoy.

That was my advice to myself this week when I grew frustrated with my inability to attract a fiction agent. My nonfiction career is going great guns with our seventh edited anthology, thanks, but nobody thinks I have an imagination? I took myself on a long, shady walk in the woods to give myself a pep talk.

Two years now, I’ve been working on a coming-of-age novel set in West Virginia. Two years, the characters have shaped and stammered and grabbed the keyboard from my hands and run amok across it. Now it’s time to edit the opening to make it more of a grabber than an explainer. Something that has never been my forte. But in the personal rejections coming from agents (in a ratio of 1 personal for 3 standard), they pretty much say the same thing: the opening isn’t making me care what happens to the characters.

This is a puzzle to be solved, a craft to be practiced, and I have to remind myself I write because I like writing, because there are things to be said, and because it keeps me from strangling people with my bare hands. So, there’s that. Do what you love because you love it, and remember that’s why you started this journey.

That said, the journey doesn’t have to end down a dead-end alley with the words “your characters are not compelling” written on it. I intend to see that mine does not.

But oh, the energy, oh the strategy, oh the strange masochistic joy of this journey.

If you’re out there writing,too, be encouraged. I’ve published seven books across four lovely publishers, and this is what I have to say about our industry right now: this too shall pass. One way or another, we will unstick. Because, writing.

Get up and try again, kids. That’s my plan.