Writer's block (maybe it doesn't really exist)

I have to confess something it took me years to say out loud: I don't believe in writer's block. Not the way we usually tell it to ourselves, anyway. That romantic, almost noble idea of the muse abandoning you, leaving you stranded in front of the blank page like a lover who stopped answering your texts. For a long time I used it too, as an excuse, and it worked perfectly, because it sounded more dignified than the truth.

The less flattering truth: it was fear

The truth, once I finally stopped circling around it, was much simpler and much less flattering: I was afraid. Afraid that what I'd write wouldn't be good enough, afraid of discovering that the idea I'd been carrying in my head for months would turn out, once it hit the page, to be ordinary. The block wasn't a wall stopping me from writing. It was perfectionism wearing the costume of impossibility, so I wouldn't have to face my own temporary mediocrity.

Forty days stuck on one chapter

While writing my first novel, I sat stuck on one chapter for forty days. Forty — I counted afterward, with a mix of embarrassment and tenderness for that terrified earlier version of myself. Every day she'd open the document, read the last few lines, find them inadequate, and close everything. What broke the spell wasn't inspiration. It was a blunt piece of advice from a writer friend, further along in her career and far less patient with my complaining: write the worst page of your life, on purpose, and see what happens.

I did. I wrote something horrible — clumsy, full of pointless adjectives and fake dialogue. And that horrible page led me to the next one, which was a little less horrible, and then to the one after that. The secret, if we can call it that, is that quality doesn't come before quantity. It comes after, in revision, once you already have raw material to shape. Expecting to write well on the first try is like expecting to sculpt without ever having the block of marble in front of you.

Permission to write badly

So if you've been stuck for weeks on that chapter that won't move, I'm asking you to try one experiment before giving in to the romantic idea that the muse has left you. Give yourself explicit permission — write it down somewhere if you need to — to write badly. Not well, not interesting, not publishable. Just present on the page. Judgment comes later. First comes the courage to be mediocre for a moment, because that's always where it starts, even when the final result gives no hint of it.

Marghi