Here’s a wonderful myth, one you’ll hear retold from writing class to university up and down the land: ‘Write about what you know.’

I almost fall off my chair laughing typing those words. Shakespeare never set foot in Denmark but he wrote Hamlet. He almost certainly never visited Italy, yet he wrote Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julius Caesar, and scattered Italian references throughout his work. Was he crippled by his ignorance? You tell me.

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You never walk into a supermarket and hear the person on the till say, ‘Sorry, I can’t serve you today. I’ve got checkout person’s block.’ Yet every day, every minute it seems, someone somewhere in the world dashes their hands to head and shrieks that the muse has mysteriously departed them. On social media naturally.

At events I get asked all the time, ‘What do you do when you get writer’s block?’ As if it’s a given, an ailment we all suffer from. Do I? No. There are times when I struggle for something to write. That’s not the same as being unable to work on a story at all. But the block thing is so commonly written about it must, in some sense anyway, be ‘real’ — in the way Father Christmas and Bigfoot are deemed to exist too. I’ve even seen published writers bewailing their block in public, which is odd indeed. A word of advice: public bewailing by writers on any subject is best avoided, not least because we’ve got a very cushy job compared to many.

What should you do if you can’t think of something to write? Anything but stare at the computer pleading for help. In case you haven’t noticed, it can’t hear you.

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Craft Notes is a weekly column on the craft of fiction writing, published every Thursday at 8am UK time. These posts draw on four decades of published work — not a writing school, just one working novelist’s hard-won observations.

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There’s a hoary old chestnut you hear in writing schools sometimes. It says if you haven’t grabbed your reader by the third paragraph of your opening scene your book’s doomed. No one will read it, least of all any busy agent or editor.

This is balderdash, and dangerous balderdash at that. I’ve seen wannabe writers swallow it whole then agonise for weeks on end trying to formulate the perfect few opening paragraphs for a story that rarely ends up getting written. Why? Because all they’ve done is sweat over producing a beginning that’s supposed to be smart and clever and attention-grabbing, never giving much thought at all to what comes after: the book.

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