I'm incredibly lucky to be able to spend my days doing the thing I enjoy most. When I have the house to myself and there aren't other demands screaming for my time, I'll sit at my desk in the little room at the front of our house, and open up my laptop. Usually, having found the time to write, I'm pretty good at getting on with it. I haven't, so far, been rendered incapable of writing by any kind of existential angst. For me, any glitch in the process will be about the story I'm trying to write.

Sometimes I'll write myself into a corner and realise that there's no sensible way out of it, or I'll need one of my characters to behave in a way that they just wouldn't behave or to know something that they just can't know. Usually, I'll have a break to see if I can work my way through it. The default break is a cup of tea and a minor interaction with one of the household appliances -- I might as well make myself useful by putting some washing on or making some biscuits. If that doesn't work, at least I have clean clothes and something tasty to have with my next cup of tea. Plan B is to go out: to potter around the garden, have lunch with a friend or get some shopping in. That might sound suspiciously like slacking off, but all of this time, my story is ticking away at the back of my mind and usually whatever problem I was having with the narrative or the characters will have sorted itself out by the time I get back to it.

I occasionally have a break without realising I'm doing it. I'll spend an afternoon drawing a family tree or checking on Google maps how long it would take to walk from A to B. I try to get the details right, so if I need a horse-drawn carriage from the early nineteenth-century or a staircase in a seventeenth-century stately home, I'll usually look for a photo online to try and make sure I don't make my ignorance too obvious. Hunting for images online appears to involve entering a parallel universe in which time travels more slowly, because I can spend five minutes looking at photos of cups of tea (I've just done this) and somehow half an hour has passed in the real world. It's important to be clear that this isn't wasting time. This is research, and don't you forget it.

When I really can't figure out how to move forward, sometimes I go backwards instead. I go back to page one and read/rewrite everything I've written so far. Along the way, I can usually fix whatever wasn't working so that when I reach the part I was stuck on, it isn't a problem anymore.

This may be heresy, but sometimes I'll just skip over the bit I'm having trouble with and pick up from where I want the story to get to. For me, *** means 'don't forget to write this bit'. By the time I go round again, it's usually more straightforward than it seemed.

Finally, when it feels impossible to find a way around whatever's causing me problems, I'll put whatever it is I'm writing aside. It sounds like giving up, but it's not. If it's any good, I will come back to it later -- it just needs longer to percolate. If it's not any good, it's better to put it aside and do something else -- I can live with a nagging good intention in the back of my mind for the rest of my life -- than to sit there every day staring at my screen convincing myself I'm worthless.

So that's how to deal with writers' block. Have a break. Do something else. Work around it. Let it have a break from you. Do not, whatever you do, let it smell your fear.