did she also recall the opening line of the novel Snoopy never did get to finish? “It was a dark and stormy night ….”    Time didn’t allow me to explain that this was not actually a Snoopy original. The celebrated incipit was dognapped by Snoopy’s creator, Charles M. Schulz, from Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, a mid-19th century English novelist, poet, playwright and politician who also coined phrases such as “the great unwashed”, “pursuit of the almighty dollar” and “the pen is mightier than the sword”.

Late nights at his typewriter turned into blurry mornings, with little to show on paper.

As he was writing (or not writing), he jotted notes to himself.“If something happened that struck me, I would write a note — sometimes just on a little scrap of paper — and would slip these pieces of paper into a folder,” he said in the interview. “Especially if I got stuck, I would take another piece of paper and say, ‘You’re stuck on this damn paper, so write about why you got stuck.’”The idea was to just get his thoughts down.

Professor Elbow came to his conclusions out of necessity.“What got me interested in writing,” he often said, “was being unable to write.”

Writers block sounds hard to overcome, but who ever has conversation block?

Wordcraft shined the most as a brainstorming partner and source of inspiration. Writers found it particularly useful for coming up with novel ideas and elaborating on them. AI-powered creative tools seem particularly well suited to sparking creativity and addressing the dreaded writer's block.

A few months ago, during an insomnia-inducing crisis of confidence about where the hell I should be going next with my writing, I suddenly remembered my journal. I hadn’t written in it for a while. Although it was 1:30 in the morning, I got out of bed, went into my study, opened up my journal, and simply began to write. I wrote about being unable to write, the things I thought were preventing me from writing, and what I thought I should do about it. The simple act of writing these thoughts down meant that I no longer felt the need to rehearse them over and over in my head, so I could return to bed and sleep the sleep of the effortlessly talented. When I woke next morning, my crisis of confidence had reduced to a mild concern. My late-night journal session had put things in perspective. It had shown me a way forward.

American journalist, author, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger oncewrote on the subject of “writer’s block”: “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’sthat I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledgeabout that topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words,[but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition.”7