When it comes to getting to work, my trick is to conjure my inner-nun-with-a-ruler-in-hand and simply force myself to begin. Beginning is about three-quarters of the battle for me. Once I’m into the work, it’s so much more interesting than anything happening on Facebook.

There were a few times I got stuck and I would do automatic writing where you just decide, okay, for five minutes or eight minutes or 10 minutes, you just write and you don’t stop for a second, and you end up with pages and pages of stuff that way. And there’s stuff you can glean from it. There’s vague ideas or just a couple of sentences that’ll make you think of something. So that would be an easy-ish way to worm myself out of hitting a wall.

I love reading diaries of artists and writers because it’s really hard to explain the creative life to the average person. People always ask me, “What do you do all day?” Your daily life can feel a little bit indulgent. When I read diaries and letters, I’m always struck by how banal it all is. It’s not about creating most of the time. It’s just about living. I find great comfort in those texts.

I think most of the ways we get stuck are self-imposed, but I also think most of our problems are in how we respond to the world or our situations. So I can’t say it’s false. I can’t say it’s not a thing. I think what it is is a broad term for the experience of being creatively stalled, or not being able to align your vision with your practice. The points where I’ve found myself stuck have been points where I could imagine what I wanted to write, and did not have the skill, or did not have the tools, or did not have the bandwidth, or did not have the space, or the money, or the time. That writer’s block. I will also say, as an addendum to that, I think a lot of what people call writer’s block right now is such a profound level of distraction that it isn’t actually writer’s block, it’s a block of [having too much] online and screen time.