It’s very challenging working through it, but I think my stutter teaches me how to work through it. One of the things that it teaches me is when the block is happening, it presents an opportunity for another kind of encounter, another kind of beauty, and another kind of intimacy. The story that I often tell, and it’s just one of many examples, but this one time I was at a Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Brooklyn. I was in line and I went up to order my food. I got through my order, it’s very busy, there’s people lined up behind me and then the person asked me my name, and I block on my name. The person taking my order just stood there and waited so kindly, very gently. I felt so safe with them. I’m blocking, I’m blocking, and there’s nothing coming out. At a certain point, they were like, “You can just tell me the first letter if you want.” And I couldn’t say that. So we just stood there, I don’t know maybe 15, 30 seconds, and then I said my name, and then we went on. To me, it was so beautiful. Me and this person who I may never see again, whose name I do not know, we shared this interval of silence. It was just so beautiful and so intimate and so vulnerable. Vulnerable probably because other instances I have people will say, “Oh, did you forget your name?” Or they’ll laugh. There are many ways that people react to me stuttering up my name, some of which have been very painful. With that particular interaction, the block enabled this specific exchange between the two of us that probably would not have happened if I didn’t stutter my name.

We called that the 'story crisis,' and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There's been one on every film. We don't stop production for five months. We've gotten a little smarter about it. But there always seems to come a moment where it's just not working, and it's so easy to fool yourself - to convince yourself that it is when you know in your heart that it isn't.

No, for me it’s the opposite. I have to find ways to stop the thought process because the thought process is constant; it’s constantly everywhere. And that’s not to make me sound pretentious, because it sometimes makes me unhappy. It can keep you awake or you have it in the middle of a meeting.

Just realizing that the block’s part of it. There’s always a week or two, or even a full month, where I’m convinced I’ll never write again, that everything was a fluke before. Or I’m writing, and I can’t tell if it’s inspired or shitty, but I don’t really freak out like I used to. I know that it’s just part of eventually figuring it out. It used to make me panic, but now I know it’s just what happens.