I’ve been wanting to write about writer’s block for some time now, but I haven’t been able to find the right words.

Nothing like a dad joke to get things moving. Or is it just a shit joke? Is there a difference?

In my old life as a PR, I found run-of-the-mill days dull as dishwater. Whereas the days that started early, involved back-to-back meetings, perhaps even a new business pitch, and closed with a 10pm company-funded taxi home from the office, those days were energising, nourishing, and fulfilling.

Admittedly, sustaining this frenetic professional pace for six or seven days a week, month after month would ultimately lead to my complete physical and mental collapse, but I have surprisingly few regrets about working so hard and with such intensity during that period of my life. Sure, it cost me a lot of free time, and at least one relationship, but in fairness, it was a bad relationship. The sort of relationship that you’ll do everything in your power to avoid.

How different things look today. Today, run-of-the-mill is ideal. Run-of-the-mill means that I’m not being distracted by pesky colleagues or clients (I love you really), or the peskiest people of all, family and friends. Just me and my brain, at a desk with a computer and a cup of coffee. Every writer’s dream.

Except that sometimes the writing doesn’t happen. You show up, but your brain doesn’t get the memo. So you sit at your desk and either you stare blankly at the blank page in front of you like a blithering idiot, or you procrastinate by endlessly reordering the reminders in your calendar – reminders which are of course notifying you of the need to do the writing that you’re not doing.

Entire days can pass like this. Sometimes it can last the best part of a week, by which point you’ve had to move all of those diary reminders into Saturday and Sunday morning and apologise to your partner for ruining the forthcoming weekend.

You see, inspiration is like a fire drill – guaranteed to arrive without warning at the most inconvenient moment in the day. When inspiration arrives, you have no choice but to follow it, because you just don’t know when it will be in town again.

And when I talk about inspiration, I’m not talking about channelling F Scott Fitzgerald or Nabokov or Eliot or Bronte (not even Anne). I’m literally talking about the ability to get 600 words of non-garbage down on paper. I’m talking good enough; adequate; sufficient to keep me in employment for another month. That’s all I ask for, and sometimes even that is beyond me.

The best remedy is to do something different. Walking is helpful, although walking generally takes you further and further from your desk, which is problematic if you’re supposed to be at work. Podcasts are useful, so long as you avoid panel shows involving C-List comedians offering a revisionist look at notorious historical despots, or interrogating quantum physics, or basically anything involving C-List comedians. And the best remedy of all is long-haul face-to-face conversations with smart people, which… well, we’re all in the same boat on this one.

Other useful tips? I try not to write for more than five hours per day. That’s usually the point at which my writing turns to treacle. And I try not to write more than two pieces of copy per day, even if it means having to push a piece into the weekend.

Working as a professional writer has presented me with the most curious challenge of my career. The writing itself is no problem – piece of cake! But those long periods of non-writing, where you’re not simply doing your job badly, but you’re quite literally not doing your job at all, they’re a real killer.

And as you may be able to tell from the conclusion of my previous sentence, just like that, inspiration has left the building.

Photo by Matthew LeJune on Unsplash