WRITER’S block is a good laugh. It’s something I didn’t think was actually real until I started writing a novel for the first time recently, and also, doing this column.

I don’t know how many hours of life over the last six months have been spent sitting at my laptop, a blank document staring back at me, feeling like I’ve lost the ability to write.

When I started writing stories, maybe about four years ago, it wasn’t something I ever had to contend with. I had 24 years’ worth of ideas for things that I just hadn’t written.

Anytime I sat down to write I had a million ideas and they just came pouring out onto the page with absolute ease. I’d sometimes be able to write the same story three or four times with different endings and then pick the one I liked the best. Now I consider myself lucky if I manage to pluck even a semblance of an idea out of the air.

I’m in awe of writers like Stephen King. A guy who seems to have a new 500+ page book out every 10 months or something. How does he do it? How can he just sit down and write that amount of words, all in the right order to tell a big long story? And how does he do it so prolifically?

In my opinion, there should be an anti-doping agency looking at what folk like him are up to. I don’t want him banned from writing if he is taking some kind of performance enhancing drug, I just want a wee crumb whatever it is he must be using. Just to see.

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I’ve been writing a play for the Glasgow International Comedy Festival in March since November last year and writer’s block hit me hard when I got to around a third of the way through it. I just had no idea what I wanted to happen next, never mind how to give the thing a good, funny ending. It got so bad that I only managed to finish it last week, about three months overdue. I only managed to get it done when I realised the best time for me to write, when I feel the most creative and I have the most ideas, is at stupid o’clock at night.

I was sitting pulling my hair out, silently screaming at my computer, last Monday morning, feeling like the play was never going to get finished and I’d have to cancel it. Ask the theatre to refund everyone’s tickets and accept the grief that would come my way. Cancel the play and, also, cancel myself. This went on until about 11pm. A full day spent pacing about the flat, berating myself for not having any ideas. I was feeling tired but I sat down and said to myself I couldn’t go to bed until I finished it.

Thirty pages to write and I’d stay up until it was done no matter what. I made a coffee and sat and just wrote and wrote.

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The more tired I got the more the ideas came. It was nearly 7am when I finally wrote ‘The End’.

I’ve found that writing in the wee hours, when it feels like everyone else in the world is asleep, is brilliant. Hardly any distractions and when you’re that tired it’s like the bit of your brain that’s responsible for dreams starts to kick in while you’re still awake and your thoughts become a bit more lucid and interesting. It’s class.

What isn’t so class is the next day after a late night writing session. I got to bed just before 7am then was woken up by the dug at his usual time of getting up, 9am, so he could go for a pee. Going about the rest of the day after that, unable to go back to sleep, felt like someone had reached inside my skull, lifted out my brain, wrung it out like a wet cloth and then put it back in. I tried to do some emails and found I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I might start kidding on to myself that I have a real job and say I’m working nightshift when I pull an all-nighter to get stuff done.

I don’t think writer’s block is exclusive to writers. I think it’s just a name which writers have given to that feeling of not having any idea how to fix a problem. Sometimes you’ll be stuck not knowing how to fix something in work or your personal life, it’s the same feeling as writer’s block. But you can and will sort it out. The things that work for writer’s block help with other real life problems.

Something as simple as putting headphones and going for a walk for an hour, cleaning the house or watching a film, can reset your brain and allow you to refocus on the problem with a clear mind.