Writer’s block is a funny thing when your usual conception of your own mental functioning is that your conscious mind does little to no work in the writing process. Multisensory aphantasia tends to leave one with the expectation that a blank page will just slowly fill itself with pertinent words and sentences. This usually works fairly well; the greatest difficulty is a certain stiffness or pain in the fingers while they are moving on the keyboard—but even that happens automatically.
So what, then, is writer’s block if this is your condition? Put simply, it is the lack of will to sit down and let the work do itself. It is perhaps a unique form of laziness, or restlessness. The unconscious mind does the work but it is completely possible for this to get disrupted by other distractions. It’s okay to respond to social media. It’s okay to go get a bite to eat. It’s okay to sit and fidget with the spreadsheet used to track progress. It’s even okay to say “to hell with this, I’m done for the day”.
But the unconscious, with its infinite potential to generate the desired words and pile them up into books, cannot do its work unless one is still and remains on task. Every writer’s experience of writer’s block is unique. This is mine.
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