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.

Take a break. Mow the lawn. Walk the dog. Learn to speak Croatian. Give your aching brain a rest from being banged against the narrative wall. Do that and my guess is the solution will one day leap into your head at the most unexpected of moments and you’ll be kicking yourself over how obvious it sounds.

The ‘I can’t write’ feeling almost always has a very specific, identifiable cause — if you’re willing to be honest about it. You’ve lost the thread of the story. A character has ceased to be believable and you know it, but don’t want to admit the fact. The plot has taken a turn that felt exciting at the time and now looks like a dead end. The ending you had in mind no longer works. These are story problems, not psychological afflictions. Treat them like story problems: go back, find where the thread snapped, and fix it there.

The one genuine form of block I recognise is the paralysis that comes from caring too much about what you’re putting on the page. Perfectionism is a block. The solution is to write badly — deliberately, consciously, permission granted. A bad page exists. A blank page does not. You can always improve a bad page. You can do nothing at all with a blank one except start all over from scratch.