Writers will agree with me when I say that writer's block is just about the worst thing that can happen to us. It stops your thoughts in their tracks and keeps you from moving forward to new and interesting projects. So what can make writer's block worse?

Needing to write a 20-page short story for your final.

When I was younger and I wrote for fun, writer's block wasn't the end of the world, nor did it really stop me from doing what I needed to do. I could still get my homework done and then return to the story at a time when I had enough inspiration to keep going forward. From a young age, I knew that I wanted to pursue writing as a career, and that drove me to start looking into creative writing as a major at whatever school I went to.

There was truly bliss in ignorance when I started college. I started with zero creative writing classes because I was a freshman. My college life was looking a lot like my high school life. Inspiration came and went. When it was gone, I struggled to find something to work on, but there was always school to fall back on. There were plenty of books that I had to read anyway. So I kept moving forward.

But then I entered my first creative writing class, English 353. Not only was this just creative writing, but we were doing short stories. It wasn't something I had really tried to do and it wasn't really something that I enjoyed.

We started with basic exercises and I found everything we did really fun. Then we neared the end of the quarter and our final projects were looming over us. I realized then that I had no clue what I wanted to write about and what I wanted to do with my final project.

I stressed over it and stressed over it for a week before I sat down and just started putting together a story out of the exercises that we had written before, but even that story wasn't working for me. I found myself with the most frustrating case of writer's block ever.

Yet, my frustration didn't just come from being unable to write. My frustration came from the fact that I couldn't just wait it out. I had to keep moving forward despite everything inside of me. The school and the teacher and the class certainly weren't going to run on my time. So I did the only thing I could do.

I rewrote and rewrote my story from beginning to end. I wrote the story until I made myself like it. I wrote that story until it was something that I wanted to perfect. I was no longer waiting for the inspiration to come back to me. I couldn't wait for inspiration. Instead, I let inspiration catch up with me.

Since then, I've been racing ahead of my inspiration and making my way through stories that I would have no patience for when I was younger. It's been both a blessing and a curse to be so stubborn about what I want to do with my life, but in this case, I believe that the good has outweighed the bad in every situation.

So for all those aspiring writers that run into writer's block along the way (whether writing as a hobby or a career), push yourself forward like your story is due tomorrow. Don't let your block stop everything in its tracks. If it's impossible to write the story you want to work on, then write something else. Just, whatever you do, don't stop writing.