Marilee asked Amy Stewart:

I just read Casey Cep's Furious Hours. I felt every readers frustration that Harper Lee wasn't able to turn years of research into a book. After so much investigative work, she had the kernel of a terrific true crime book she was to call The Reverend, but couldn't pull the trigger. Cep notes that writer's block is a symptom, not a condition in itself. Have you ever experienced it? You seem prolific, but ???

Amy Stewart I don't believe in writer's block. There are books that are hard to figure out or just aren't viable for some reason--there's a book I'd like to write, for instance, but the research is all in old French archives and I don't speak French and I think a translator would just get in the way (and be crazy expensive). But you can always sit down and write SOMETHING. It might be terrible, it might be something you'll have to cut or revise later, but we can all sit down and write a page. And those pages add up!

You just have to be willing to sit down and do work that's mediocre, boring, going nowhere, perhaps truly bad...and if you're not willing to do that, that's not writer's block, it's just a choice about how to spend your time. It's fine to choose not to do difficult/boring/frustrating/embarassingly bad work. In fact, it's a luxury! Go do something else! The world is not banging down your door, demanding another book. (well, unless you're George RR Martin). No one will object in the least if you set a book project aside and move on to something else--literary or otherwise.

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