Five Problems All Writers Have

It doesn't matter what genre you write for, these five problems will sound familiar if you're a writer.

1. You're VERY easily distracted

It doesn't matter what you're working on, as soon as you sit down in front of that blank document, it will occur to you to do a billion other things. You'll do promotional stuff for your other work, you'll do networking (read: muck about on Twitter and Facebook) or you'll even come up with new and pointless writing projects... like submitting articles to BuzzFeed.

2. You have the search history of a serial killer

"How do you get away with murder?"

"Can you die having sex?"

"Can you kill someone with cocaine?"

"The symptoms of chlamydia"

... are just some of the creepy/embarrassing search terms you might find yourself googling in the name of research.

To a perfect stranger you have the search history of someone with serious problems, but you're writing a book and you need to know these things. And, of course, you can't clear your search history - what if you need to go back to it?

3. You drink too much

People make enough jokes about writers being alcoholics. Well, I write women's fiction, and I see my fellow writers talk about wine often enough, so I'm not saying anything. But, the real thing we writers drink too much of is caffeine. A lot of us need tea or coffee to even function, and whether you're sat in Starbucks all day or working through the night, it's easy to knock back drink after drink without a second thought. However, if you finish your work and you've still got all that energy buzzing around in you, it isn't pretty. Too much caffeine will cause your heart to pound in your chest, you're anxious, but you don't know why, and no matter what time it is you can just forget about sleeping. So you sleep in the next day, you're up late that night, and the cycle repeats.

4. Writers block

You're not distracted, you're not making excuses to do other things, you're just sitting there, fingers over the keyboard and... nothing. Sometimes you have a chapter plan, you know what you want to write but nothing is happening. Other times you need an idea and nothing is coming to you. It's a cliché, but writers block is a real thing. Nothing happens, no matter how willing and ready to work you are.

5. You can't stop writing

It's finally happened! You're not distracted, you're not tripping on caffeine, you're not suffering writers block and all your research and planning is done. You start writing and your story is just pouring out of you. It's flowing like a beautiful river of words, you feel like you could write forever, etc. The only problem when you're on a roll is that you don't want to stop. You're enjoying yourself, you're working well, and you don't want this to end because you know that the next time you sit down to write things won't go so smoothly. So what do you do? You put your phone on silent, you ignore the outside world, you don't take care of yourself, you don't eat or sleep... You just write, for as long as it takes.