Halloween Scaries: Trick or Treat?

Halloween. It’s the only day of the year that taking candy from a stranger is acceptable. Not only do you not know the person you’re taking candy from, but you’ve willingly walked up to their door and knocked before asking for a sweet treat. 

Luckily, nobody has ever opened the door and responded to my sweet, “Trick or treat!” with a handful of coal or some onions to put in my treat bag, but I can 100% confirm that as an author, most days are a grab bag of writing and far too often, the document is opened only for a trick (read: low word counts and writer’s block) to jump out and scare you. 

This Halloween marks the fourteenth Halloween that I’ll have spent writing the same novel. Rome may not have been built in a day, but I can guarantee that if it were moving this slowly, they’d have probably decided to move on and establish some other empire where it was easier to accomplish. For fourteen years, I’ve been dealt too many tricks and not enough treats to fill my basket and motivate me to keep knocking on the door. 

So why do I do it? Why do authors still keep knocking on doors, asking for something sweet and satisfying when we’re dealt so much disappointment and frustration? Why do we keep waltzing up to another blank document even though the last seventeen times we’ve tried, we’ve been handed writer’s block and at this rate, we are paving the road to our own destruction?

The answer is simple, if not a little masochistic.

Because when it’s good, it’s really good. And there’s the hope that the next time we don the skin of our characters, we’ll be greeted with a kind muse that is ready to help show us the way to success. It doesn’t always happen; sometimes Pennywise is waiting in the gutter and offering us a balloon. But the times when we knock on the door and are greeted with a smile and the writing equivalent of a king-sized KitKat bar? You better believe those days are worth every. single. creepy. ass. balloon. the muses have tried to throw our way. 

We may all float down there, but as long as we aren’t allowing ourselves to succumb to the gutters of our worst imaginings of failure and irrelevance, we’ll all eventually shine. And with the right perspective, our Midas touch can turn those tricks into treats when we least expect them.