Goodreads asked Paul Burman:

How do you deal with writer’s block?

Paul Burman It depends what's meant writer's block.

I've abandoned a couple of novels recently after 50,000 + words because I no longer felt that the idea was worth pursuing - as if, in pursuing an idea, I'd outgrown my interest in it. I wasn't 'blocked', but no longer felt the idea was worth investing the time and energy in, so quickly moved on to the next project to see if it would work.

Of course, almost every project throws up an occasional problem or difficulty - surely this is true for everybody and not just writers - which halts progress. If this is what's meant by writer's block, then I have a variety of strategies from brain-storming, to temporarily by-passing that issue, to rethinking everything that led up to that point, but usually find that a solution presents itself either in the middle of the night or when I'm standing in the shower. The shower is an amazing place for solving writerly problems.

If by writer's block, we're talking about a negative psychological force that stops a writer from believing they can write, paralysing them into inaction, a bit like stage fright, then I suppose it's a matter of knowing how to handle self-doubt. There's barely a day of writing that isn't accompanied by doubt of some sort, either in my ability to write the way I want to, or in the value of what I'm doing from a publisher or reader's point of view (which might have nothing in common anyway), but I carry on writing because I enjoy it... knowing that when I stop enjoying it I'll stop writing.

I'm not sure I've fully answered the question, but it might be a more complex one than it at first appears to be.

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