Weekend column: Writer's block? Here's advice from Steinbeck

I know that her eyebrows draw down over her eyes when she’s angry. I know she doesn’t like parallel parking or people who drink too much. She lives alone and she likes Radio 4. She’s not so much suspicious of flirting as baffled by it.

I can close my eyes and watch as she walks, in her slightly shambling gait, across the floor of my brain before stopping and looking up slightly accusingly, as if to say, “Well, what did you bring me here for?”

Unfortunately, she’s got a good point. Because it turns out that without giving her a story, she hasn’t really got much going on.

It will be, I admit, difficult to fulfil my dream of writing one great book, making £25m off the film rights and retiring to a desert island with the first of my three husbands, all before I turn 35, if I can’t come up with anything for this poor woman to do.

Reassuringly, writer’s block strikes for the brilliant just as much as it does for the dangerously optimistic.

It happens even for those who find plotting little more than a matter of careful execution, like J.K. Rowling (yes, the Harry Potter author who harbours strange impulses to over-explain her characters’ sexualities years after completing the series). Some time ago, she released her ‘series grid’, which factors in plot lines and where they fit within the chronology of her stories. It’s difficult to imagine such a competently organised author, laying out each of her books as if planning the opening stages of a military assault, ever suffering from writer’s block. However, Rowling – who is worth, by the way, around $1bn – has previously told interviewers she struggles sometimes with her work.

I doubt her brief forays into self-doubt are quite the same as those of poor, tortured Tennessee Williams, whose alcohol dependency eventually took over his life.

In 1953, he wrote in his diary about his new play, which was driving him, or so he said, to the bar. “What most troubles me is not just the lifeless quality of the writing, its lack of distinction, but a real confusion that seems to exist, nothing carried through to completion but written over and over, as if a panicky hen running in circles,” he wrote in a state of frantic, electric alarm. Although his later work did possess some of these features, he was, in fact, writing about one of his greatest successes, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Williams’ complicated, masculine, mercurial contemporary Ernest Hemingway harboured no such insecurity. It’s easy to picture him, white linen shirt open at the collar, moustache shot through with grey, standing on the roof of a Parisian maison and telling himself: “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

But perhaps even high praise wouldn’t have helped poor Williams much. American writer and critic Gilbert Seldes gave an ecstatic review to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. It was said this caused Fitzgerald – himself an extraordinarily heavy drinker – great stress and misery. As writer Malcolm Cowley said: “The trouble is that after something like that, every work has to count – every word has to live up to this marvellous praise. The poor author gets stage fright.”

And so Fitzgerald did. He struggled so badly with writer’s block that he began to believe inspiration was finite, and that his was used up. He died of a heart attack at 44, before finishing the manuscript for what would be his final work, The Last Tycoon.

Perhaps the best advice I’ve found comes from John Steinbeck, who urged all would-be authors to “write it as a letter aimed at one person”.

“This,” he counselled, “removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness.”

So I’ll start all over again, but this time, I’ll be writing directly to you.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll be retiring at 35 after all.