Writing Tools Matter

Pen and paper and time, oh my!

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2026 is already seven weeks old.
I’ve published a peppering of social media posts.
Drafted more emails than I care to admit.
Scripted three workshops.

And yet…

I haven’t made a dent in the book I promised myself I would finish by May 1st.

Not a significant dent, anyway.

Getting Back

Finding time to write has never been the hardest part for me. Sitting down to write? That’s my safe place. I get lost in the sound of a depressed key. The cool metal of my mechanical keyboard warming under my fingertips.

The rhythm. The cadence. The build.

I love building words into worlds. Painting images.
Playing with pace. Pauses. Beats.

When I’m in flow, it feels like conducting a symphony. Everything rising and resolving exactly when it should.

And then — silence.

The clacking stops.
The imagery disappears.
The screen stares back.

I’ve had writer’s block before. For a while, I refused to believe in it. I’d been told it was simply a “disconnection from the material.”

Maybe that’s true. But recently? It wasn’t that the story wasn’t there. It was that the screen felt too far away from the words.

The Shift

In my garage, I found a stack of notebooks I’d gathered for my Letters To My Emotions workshop. Crisp. Clean. Waiting. I grabbed one and collapsed onto the sofa.

The pages begged for ink. With a new pen in hand, I wrote.

And wrote.

And wrote.

Before I knew it, I had pages — messy ones. The story meandered. It shattered rules I coach my clients not to break. There was too much exposition. Not enough showing. Grammar without spellcheck was… tragic.

But the world was there.

Love.
Tension.
Intrigue.
Sacrifice.

The story wasn’t blocked.
It just needed a different doorway.
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The Reminder

Sometimes the problem isn’t discipline.
It’s distance.

Sometimes you don’t need a new strategy. You need a new entry point.

A pen instead of a keyboard.
A sofa instead of a desk.
A page without pressure.

Progress doesn’t always look polished. Sometimes it looks like ink-stained fingers and imperfect paragraphs.

But it moves.
And movement matters more than perfection.