Why I keep coming back to blank pages
Melissa’s rule is simple: if it wrote for you, it took something from you.
We went into this expecting to talk about writing prompts. We ended up talking about something bigger: what creativity is worth, what gets stripped away when you hand it over, and why “efficiency” can be a dangerous idea when it starts running your art.
The blank page is not the enemy.
Melissa put it plainly: writer’s block isn’t really a block. It’s usually just not knowing what happens next. Her fix is disarmingly simple—stop, go for a walk, talk it out loud, or return to the last line you liked and start there.
That’s not productivity theater. It’s process: how she keeps moving when the story refuses to behave.
What surprised me was that she doesn’t treat detours as failure. One of her cozy mystery books started with coin collecting and ended up being shaped by a semi-professional wrestling bout. The original outline got thrown out completely, and the new story was better for it.
Constraints made her more creative, not less.
Melissa and Lisa Mahoney built Rollerprompt to help writers get unstuck using dice, randomized elements, and guardrails. A dragon prompt might ask whether it’s born from an egg, how big it is, whether it speaks, how it’s discovered, what it exhales, and even what letter its name starts with.
Melissa rolled a palm-sized, two-headed dragon that breathes sonic waves. Brenda, basically.
The randomness isn’t chaos—it’s a useful problem. It gives your brain something to solve. When Melissa runs prompts on the show, she sees the same idea produce completely different stories from different writers. Same seed, different output.
That’s the point.
“Writer’s block doesn’t exist. What’s happened is you don’t know what happens next.”
Melissa also returned to the value of old-school, hands-on work: walls, notes, and scraps. She storyboards on whiteboards, drafts in Scrivener, formats in Vellum, and keeps copies everywhere because she’s been burned before.
Her system is built around protecting momentum, not pretending the first draft is sacred.
Her sharpest argument was about ownership.
Melissa has spent years in publishing, and she’s blunt about what she sees now: authors can give away their rights too quickly—especially audiobook rights—and then find they have less control over their own work.
She’s not anti-publishing; she’s anti-carelessness. If you’re going to sell, sell smart. Separate the rights, keep your leverage, and don’t sign away the thing that makes your book an asset.
She thinks the same caution applies to AI. Not just because it can generate text, but because it can change the relationship between a writer and their work.
Her view is firm: if AI is doing the writing for you, it’s taking over the part that makes you a writer. She’d rather have “ten weird ones” than one polished idea she didn’t build herself.
The real threat isn’t AI. It’s the devaluation of thinking.
Melissa kept circling back to empathy, patience, and the value of making things by hand—or at least by mind.
She’s not interested in a world where everything has to be efficient, optimized, or automatically generated. Sometimes the walk is the point. Sometimes the messy draft is the point. Sometimes the half-finished chapter is where the real work starts.
That’s what I’m sitting with after this conversation: the best creative systems don’t remove friction; they make room for meaning.
Take that seriously, and you stop asking how fast you can make something and start asking whether you’re still the one making it.
The full conversation covers Rollerprompt, publishing rights, Scrivener paranoia, and why Melissa would always choose a TV series over a movie.