When I’m slightly stuck in my writing, I do the dishes; when I’m medium stuck, I think of life’s terrible brevity; when I’m very stuck, I write fanfiction. Writer’s block comes from so many places. As a young person, I thought that it was just an excuse people made. Writer’s block came for me as I got closer to forty though, because its sources—exhaustion, anxiety, loss of passion—are things that I’ve grown into, or at least learned to notice. As writers, we need these experiences to be able to write about the miserable people we love most, but of course they also hold us back. So what works for me: for exhaustion, a domestic task; for anxiety, humility (and generic buspirone); for lack of passion, fanfiction. Nothing hones my instincts like writing something that will never be edited, or pours gas on the fire like writing something that can never be sold.
—Isaac Fellman, author of Dead Collections (Penguin Books, 2022)
Photo credit: Sarah Jung