Writer’s Block, Detours, and the Scene That Wouldn’t Behave / 5 Jan 2026

Writer’s block is one of those phrases that sounds rather grand, as if a mighty creative dam has been erected across the river of inspiration. In my experience, it is usually much less dramatic and much more irritating.

Often it turns out not to be a lack of words at all. It’s a problem with the scene. Or the chapter. Or the fact that one character is behaving like a sensible human being while the plot requires them to do something gloriously unwise.

A lot of my recent writing life has involved wrestling with choices like that. Is this the moment for wonder, or danger? Should this chapter move faster, or pause long enough for the reader to care? Is this a mystery, or am I just withholding information because I haven’t worked it out myself yet?

These are not always comfortable questions. Especially when you’re revisiting an outline you wrote years ago and discovering that Past You was full of confidence and rather short on practical detail. Past Me, for example, was very good at writing notes like: “Something exciting happens here.” Helpful. Stirring. Entirely unusable.

During treatment, I found that my concentration could be unpredictable. Some days I could untangle knotty story problems. Other days I stared at a paragraph as if it had personally insulted me. But even then, there was usually some small job I could do: trim a sentence, rename a chapter, rethink a character’s motive, or make a note about why a scene felt flat.

That, I think, is how you get through writer’s block. Not by waiting for the heavens to open, but by continuing to show up, even if all you can manage that day is one decent sentence and the deletion of three bad ones.

That still counts.