You never walk into a supermarket and have the person on the till say, 'Sorry, I can't serve you. I've got checkout person's block.' Yet every day, every minute it seems, someone somewhere in the world dashes their hands to head and shrieks out loud that the words won't come to their current work in progress. Why? Because they've been afflicted by that mysterious disease known as 'writer's block'.

At events I get asked all the time, 'What do you do when you get writer's block'? As if it's a given we all suffer from this strange and perhaps mythical ailment. Do I? No. There are times when I struggle for something to write. That's not the same as being unable to work on a story, not at all, as I'll discuss later. But the block thing is so commonly written about it must, in some sense anyway, be 'real', in the way Father Christmas and Bigfoot are real too. <a href="http://thecurzongroup.blogspot.com/2009/10/blocked.html" target="_blank">Here's one current writer bewailing his block in public</a> just yesterday. Personally I feel public bewailing by writers is best avoided, not least because we've got a very cushy job compared to most people. It's also worth pointing out that the writer concerned isn't blocked in the conventional sense. He's got his characters, his 'setup', his twists. He's just impaled on one key element of the piece, dreadfully, painfully stuck by the sound of it.

Do we all get that from time to time? I guess. What should you do? Anything but stare at the computer pleading for help. Take a break. Mow the lawn. Walk the dog. Learn to speak Croatian. Give your aching brain a rest from being banged against the narrative wall. Do that and my guess is the solution will one day leap into your head at the most unexpected of moments and you'll be kicking yourself over how obvious it sounds. Being nailed on one single aspect of a story that seems otherwise complete is probably the simplest block there is.

So let's look at the two bigger ones.

<!--more-->

First… Beginner's Block.

I wrote my first two books, <em>Semana Santa</em> and <em>Epiphany,</em> in a whirl. The first took a whole summer, the second just six weeks to produce a 160,000 word draft. I was on a roll. After years dreaming of being an author I finally discovered I could produce a book. It was hard work -- I was holding down a full time job in journalism at the time too. But it was achievable.

Then came book three, the final one in my then contract. I sat down and I had absolutely no idea where to go. There wasn't a storyline. There wasn't even a frame of reference. I didn't know what kind of writer I was trying to be, what kind of book I was hoping to produce. The clash between journalism, which was paying the bills, and fiction, which I hoped would one day, was getting unbearable. I was working too hard at both. So I banged out something that was rough, misshapen, very possibly unpublishable, and got it thrown back at me. What was going on?

Simple: beginner's block, something pretty much every author will encounter somewhere along his or her career. The way I see it is this. Most writers spend years dreaming of finishing a book before they ever get to complete one. When you reach that milestone <em>you think you're there.</em> Truth: you're not. You've scarcely begun. The hardest part is still ahead because your first one, two or three books are works that have been sitting festering inside you for years, waiting to be vomited up into the world. Once you find the gagging trick they come out easily. Then, after a while, there's nothing left inside. Suddenly you're dry heaving (sorry for the retching metaphors but they're the best I can think of right now).

What happens at this point? Let's be honest: a lot of people give up. They find it too hard to get past that rock. They look at the meagre amounts of money they've made for all the work put in and wonder if it's really worthwhile.

Stubborn old sods like me persist, however (stubbornness is a key authorial virtue by the way). I dragged myself out of that pit the hard way. I read the manuscript I'd produced, worked out that somewhere in it there was a kind of sci-fi thriller, then rewrote the whole thing several times until it resembled something like a conventional story. It came out as <em>Solstice,</em> did pretty well and got me published in the US for the first time. If you hit that rock and want to get past it the only way is to grind your way through. Learn the basics of the craft, which probably escaped you in the mad rush to produce your first couple of books. Try to work out what kind of writer you are and how much that matches what kind of writer you want to be. Get your head down for the long term, because chances are it will be long (haven't you noticed how few of those authors who have big hits with books one or two are still getting published at all ten years later?)

That's beginner's block and, for most of us, it's as inevitable as night follows day.

Now to the second malady. Let's call it Professional's Block. It can happen to any of us, any time and it's marked by a sudden collapse of confidence, a feeling that everything you've written so far may be inadequate or downright rubbish, coupled with a conviction you  have no way forward even though you may actually have a storyline written down somewhere that suggests otherwise.

This one invariably hits during <a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/2009/09/entering-the-twilight-zone/" target="_blank">Act Two</a> because Act Two is the place where all an author's doubts and fears about his or her abilities tend to surface. It can, as our blogging author notes elsewhere, hang over a simple mechanical turn in the story. Or it may be more metaphysical: what the hell is going on here and does anyone care? Either way it's pretty much unreal. Books don't die halfway through; they get killed. By laziness, by ennui, by a lack of self confidence, planning or care.

If you hit this brick wall here are a few things to try (in addition to the above advice about dog walking, lawn mowing and getting away from the damned thing for a while). When people talk about block what they are often saying, it seems to me, is that they fail to have a direction for the story in question. They may have an end in mind. What they lack are the staging points that lead to that conclusion. So just note down some future scenes well ahead of the one you're stuck on. Thinking about how you get from A to B is one way of loosening the jam. You could even write that future scene, or the climax of the book if you like, just to keep you going.

Another strategy is to work on the book without actually writing it. That may sound madness. It isn't. Once again I come back to the <a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/2009/08/writing-a-book-diary/" target="_blank">idea of the book diary</a>. If you're keeping one of these, faithfully and lovingly, there may well be a note somewhere in it that fires an idea in your head. Even if there isn't you can go over your thoughts about the work as it progressed and try to understand where things went awry. Blocked writers need perspective more than anything. They have to be dragged away from staring at that blank page in the manuscript. Reading and learning from your book diary is one place you can still stay hooked to the project without being constantly reminded at that moment of your inability to take it any further.

One final idea: <em>make a backup copy of your book so far then take an axe to a second version and slash out everything you don't like.</em> That's right. It's called editing. Cutting stuff out is good for the authorial soul. It forces you to think about what's important and what's not. I once went to Italy with a 30,000-word manuscript and came back with it whittled down to 12,000, happy as Larry because <em>that was progress</em>. Counting words is one thing. Counting words that count is another. Cutting like crazy will also teach you one of the most important writing lessons there is. If you are blocked on some seemingly insurmountable problem on Page 182 you can bet your last pound on the fact the problem, and its solution, actually lie way back in the history, probably around Page 131. Tackle it there and you've a hope of finishing. Keep banging away on P182 and you may well go mad.

That's my take on so-called writer's block anyway. Feel free to add your ideas and condemnation below.