Every writer is asked, sooner or later, what happens when the words dry up. People put the question gently, the way you might ask a friend how the diet is going. I always want to answer honestly, which is to say: badly, thanks for asking.
I have run into the wall more times than I care to recall, and I have learned there’s no switch you can flick to remedy the issue. There are only tricks and small habits, and sometimes an internal pep talk while you wait for the kettle to boil. None of it looks like the romantic writing life people picture.
Nobody can even agree it exists
The phrase itself arrived in 1947, coined by an Austrian-American psychoanalyst named Edmund Bergler. His theory of why writers freeze up involved oral masochism and, I promise I am not inventing this… mothers who bottle-fed their babies. The label stuck.
Plenty of working writers refuse to believe it’s even a thing. Neil Gaiman draws a line between proper writer’s block and simply being stuck; the difference, he says, is that one is handed to you by the gods and the other is your own fault. Jodi Picoult is blunter still. She reckons most writer’s block is just having too much time on your hands, and her mantra has launched a thousand fridge magnets: you can always edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.
I sit somewhere in the middle. I don’t think a mysterious force descends and steals the words. I do think there are mornings when the tank reads empty, and no amount of coffee comes close to filling it.
What it actually feels like
For me, it is rarely dramatic. There is no thunderclap, no dark night of the soul. There is a cursor, blinking a patient rhythm, and a sentence I’ve started four times and deleted four times. The cursor does not care. It has the settled confidence of a satnav telling you to perform a U-turn while you’re doing seventy on the motorway.
Some mornings I’ll sit for so long that I worry my chair might mould itself around me for good, and that someone will have to prise me out of it with a spatula. That bothers me more than it should. What I have slowly worked out, though, is that the panic itself is the block. The longer you stare at the empty page dreading it, the emptier it remains.
The tricks of the trade, stolen from better writers
Graham Greene wrote five hundred words a day and not one more. He counted them by hand in a leather notebook, and when he reached the number he stopped, even if he happened to be halfway through a sentence. Five days a week, twenty years, more than fifty books to show for it. In his sixties he dropped his quota to three hundred, which is the most relatable thing I have ever read about a literary giant. The trick is quietly brilliant: a target small enough that you can never talk yourself out of starting, and a habit strong enough that a whole novel eventually assembles itself behind your back.
Hemingway swore by stopping while the going stayed good, breaking off when he still knew what came next, so his subconscious could keep the engine ticking overnight. Leave the tap dripping, in other words, rather than turning it off at the mains.
Maya Angelou rented a bare hotel room by the month, had the hotel take the paintings off the walls, and lay across the bed to work until her elbow wore a callus. She brought a Bible, a dictionary, a deck of cards, and a bottle of sherry, which strikes me as a good night in.
Neil Gaiman’s cure is stranger and, I think, cleverer. He gives himself two options at the desk: write, or do nothing. No phone, no tidying the shed, no urgent need to alphabetise the spice rack. Just write or sit. Boredom does the rest, because eventually your own mind, starved of entertainment, starts making things up to pass the time.
The unglamorous part nobody prints on a mug
Strip away the routines and the sherry and the fountain pens, and the writers who make it past the wall nearly all do the same unremarkable thing. They write badly on purpose. They give themselves permission to put down a scene they know full well they will bin, precisely because a bad scene can be fixed and a blank one cannot. Momentum turns out to be worth more than inspiration. Inspiration is a fair-weather friend who shows up once the hard work is over and takes the credit.
When I am truly stuck, I have found the block is almost never about the sentence in front of me. It is a signal that something earlier went wrong: a character behaving in a way they never would, a plot I have quietly bent out of shape to reach a scene I’d fallen in love with. The wall is not the problem. The wall is the smoke alarm.
So the honest answer to how writers deal with writer’s block is that we do not beat it so much as outlast it. We turn up the next morning, and the morning after that, and we trust the words will eventually forgive us for whatever we did to upset them. After twenty-odd novels I can tell you it never fully leaves. You simply stop being frightened of it, which, oddly, is most of the cure.
Where my own stuck characters end up
If the idea of a person quietly stuck, staring down a wall of their own making, sounds like something you would rather read about than live through, a couple of my novels might land. In The Last Stop Video Shop, Kevin Kershaw is a man on the achy side of fifty and running out of road, handed a video tape showing a childhood memory nobody ever filmed, then left to decide whether to keep replaying his life or finally press eject. And Meeting Mungo Thunk follows Adam Maxwell, whose one daft decision unpicks his whole life, until a strange bald man turns up offering the sort of unorthodox therapy nobody asked for. Both, in their way, are about people working out how to move forward when every obvious route is blocked.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is writer’s block even real?
It depends who you ask. The psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler coined the term in 1947, and writers like Neil Gaiman and Jodi Picoult openly doubt it, treating most of it as ordinary procrastination or an unsolved problem in the story. What is real is the experience of sitting down and finding the words will not come, whatever you choose to call it.
What causes writer’s block?
Usually fear rather than mystery: fear that the work will not match the idea in your head, perfectionism that will not let a rough sentence exist, or simply too much unstructured time, as Jodi Picoult argues. Often it is a warning sign that something earlier in the story has gone wrong and needs fixing before you can move on.
How did famous authors deal with writer’s block?
Graham Greene wrote a strict five hundred words a day and stopped dead once he hit the count. Hemingway broke off while he still knew what came next, so the story kept simmering overnight. Maya Angelou rented a bare hotel room to work in, and Neil Gaiman gives himself only two options at his desk, to write or to do nothing, until boredom nudges him back to the page.
What is the best way to beat writer’s block?
Lower the stakes and write badly on purpose. A small daily target you cannot wriggle out of, permission to draft a scene you may later delete, and the reminder that you can always edit a bad page but never a blank one, will move you forward far more reliably than waiting for inspiration to knock.
Do professional authors still hit writer’s block?
Constantly, even the prolific ones. Greene produced more than fifty books and still counted every word to keep himself moving. The block does not vanish once you turn professional; you just stop being frightened of it and learn to work through it.