Me and my co-writer stopped being friends, and it put me into a huge slump.

In the middle of 2023, my best friend and I got bored over the summer, and decided to write a book purely for fun. It started out as a joke, and we filled it with cliches and didn't take it seriously. It was a stereotypical high school romance book, and we had so much fun writing it that summer. We put out two 2000+ word chapters a night for weeks. It was our favorite pass-time.

Writing with a friend just made me so much more motivated- whenever I wasn't feeling up to it, I'd have her write the next few chapters, while I brainstormed ideas for the next ones, or vice versa. It was just easier to write a book with someone helping you. She kept me motivated, and without her, I don't think I would've been able to finish this book by myself. Now, it amasses about 300k+ reads, and sometimes I go back and wonder how I even wrote such an amazing book that it made people want to reread it again.

Flash forward to summer of 2024, we got into an argument and she decided she needed space, and didn't want to be in contact with me anymore. There was nothing I could do, she already made up her mind about it. So, I let her go. I tried to continue writing on Wattpad without her, even publishing a new story, all on my own. However, it just felt wrong, and it didn't feel the same. Two creative minds is better than one, and I began to catch myself using ChatGPT to help me revise my chapters now that I didn't have a co-writer to help me. I've always relied so heavily on my ex-best friend, that now she was gone, I had no one else to rely on except for myself.

I had a sequel that I wrote with her that continued our completed book, and we only got to chapter 14 before the whole argument happened. I've had readers asking me over and over again when I'll publish a new chapter for the sequel, the one that her and I were supposed to finish together, but every time I open up the document, I just freeze up.

This was something we were supposed to finish together- finishing it without her feels wrong. I feel like a part of my creativity and love for writing disappeared when she did, and these days, I could tell that my new stories and chapters have been lackluster without her special touches. She always brought so much humor and deepness to the stories we wrote together, and now, I don't know if I can do it alone.

Once a week, I go back and reread the chapters we wrote together, and the chapters I wrote on my own while I was still her friend, and I try so hard to replicate that same light-heartedness and the same humor, but no matter how hard I try, I can never quite capture it right. I feel like my writing style and my love for it left when she did. I don't know how to solve this, I love writing, but I haven't been writing like I used to, and I hate how boring my writing has become.