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It was a social worker who first explained to me why I could no longer write. This was some time after my marriage had ended, some time (but less time) after my mother had died of a brutal and swift brain cancer, some time (but not too long) before my father too had cancer growing all through his body and would also die. I hadn’t been able to work, and my work, as it had mostly always been, consisted of putting words next to each other and selling them to outlets that would buy them and sell them on to others. ‘Being a writer’, if you had to put a name on it. The reason I was seeing a social worker and not a psychotherapist was because I couldn’t write, and a writer who can’t write is a writer who is broke, deep in overdraft and unable to see a way out.

“Of course you can’t write,” even my most well-meaning friends would tell me, followed by varying forms of: “You’ve been through hell. You’re going through hell. You just need to go easy on yourself. It’ll come back.”

These are the words friends are meant to say, but they’re not much use when the rent is due. Besides, I wanted to write. The drive was fierce. Somewhere in there was a way of making sense of all this, once the words were on the page.

I had the ideas, I tried to tell people. It’s what I told that social worker too, waving my hands around in a futile effort to explain the physical sensation of turning ideas into words. I could take all the component parts of a story and have them clear in my head. I could have all the research in the world. I could give myself time, space, patience and kindness. The bit that didn’t work was the bit that was always easy beforehand—the bit I like to think is where real writing happens, where we sort and order those fragments into our own particular forms of coherence, on a screen or on a page. The bit I’m doing now, in this article, past deadline, turning bullets and scraps into a form designed to be read.

“This makes perfect sense,” the social worker said to me. It wasn’t the creative part of my brain that was struggling, she explained. It was its executive functions. It was something she’s seen, in many forms: grief and trauma can injure these in ways that aren’t easy to repair.

Grief breaks the brain. That’s a good starting point. Something to work on. I decided that looking at the brain might offer more solace than the heart—or at least might offer a more practical way forward. If trauma can short-circuit our ability to translate thought into form, what happens inside the brain when the words won’t come? What is it, really, at the level of neurons, that writing requires of us?

With the help of a small suite of tactics I hodgepodged together (cognitive behavioural therapy, learning to meditate, exercising properly), I got my own brain sputtering along again while I went looking for answers to that question—in books, studies, and eventually in conversations with people who study the brain for a living.

If a writer stops writing, the assumption seems to be that they’ll find a real job.

Habits are “usually not helpful to anyone but their inhabitors,” writes Alice Flaherty in her 2004 book The Midnight Disease, by far but mostly by default the best book yet written on the science of writer’s block. “Writers write every which way; the only ingredient their habits have in common is that having habits helps…” And they do. For me, there’s a coping mix of little things—sitting in front of a SAD lamp in the winter mornings, timing my focus to a thirty-minute sand timer (the relentlessness of falling sand fixes me in place). Swims in the morning.

But even now, a year and a half past the death of my father and possibly at the happiest and most settled I’ve been in decades in most other aspects of my life, things don’t work like they used to when the cursor blinks. Where once I knew the deep joy of losing myself in the flow of writing, these days I just feel longing for when my brain used to work that way. The lamps and sand timers were a comfort. But they weren’t a cure.

To understand what was happening—not with the grief, whose cold logic made intuitive sense, but with the block—I started digging through whatever scientific research I could find. There was plenty of psychoanalysis, plenty about stress, and a fair bit about the issue of writer’s cramp. But little hard science on block itself. Possibly it’s not that interesting a problem to a scientist, unworthy of clinical study: if a writer stops writing, the assumption seems to be that they’ll find a real job.

At least psychoanalysis, that welcoming flophouse for blocks of all kinds, had taken the problem seriously. An Austrian psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler was the first to define writer’s block as a neurosis in 1947, plotting its origins in all the usual suspects of mid-century psychoanalysis—unconscious self-sabotage rooted in childhood trauma. The idea was quickly rejected by critics, who argued that it wasn’t a neurosis at all but rather the predictable result of having no talent, no publisher, a hangover, being broke or simply running dry of inspiration. But Bergler pushed back. None of these explanations, he insisted, accounted for what he observed in the writers he worked with. And so the long entanglement between psychoanalysis and the blocked writer began, and in many rooms, never really ended.

I’d had my flirtations with Freud, like most writers do, but in my forties—with bills to pay and less appetite for endlessly mining childhood pain—I found myself drawn to more practical maps of the mind. It wasn’t until I discovered Alice Flaherty’s work that I found someone approaching the problem with both scientific rigour and personal understanding. Flaherty, a practising neurologist and accomplished writer who had herself been hospitalised for mental health issues, wrote The Midnight Disease as a thoughtful exploration of where psychology and neuroscience intersected. Crucially, she understood the difference between the kind of writing we’re talking about and the research papers some of her academic peers might imagine when they hear “writer’s block.”

Her definition of the condition is precise: “all blocked writers share two traits: they do not write despite being intellectually capable of doing so, and they suffer because they are not writing.” It is her insistence on suffering as a criterion that made me fall deeply for her book: “someone who is not writing but not suffering does not have writer’s block; he or she is merely not writing.”

Flaherty’s insight helped me understand what I was experiencing, but it also made clear that not all writing struggles are the same. Block is not simply agraphia—the straight-up neurological loss of the ability to write. Nor is it a blanket inability to put words on a page; in fact, Flaherty argues that block tends to be restricted to only specific forms of writing—often the ones the writer cares about most deeply. I see in this the fact that I have no problems writing corporate memos or computer code, or long emails to friends.

Of course there are other blocks, too—there’s procrastination, there’s attention deficit, there’s the godawful malaise of being alive in this chaotic dying world of ours right now. These are all perfectly valid reasons not to write, to feel too anxious to write, to curl up into a ball and binge-watch bad movies. My block feels different—not a lack of ideas but an inability to form them into something whole.

Like having a perfectly good car with a broken transmission—all the parts work, but they can't work together.

Whatever the cause, there’s a physicality to this kind of block that goes beyond the realms of psychoanalysis. Through Flaherty’s book, I discovered that Joseph Conrad had described this exact sensation in an 1898 letter. His words were comfortingly familiar:

“My story is there in a fluid—in an evading shape. I can’t get hold of it. It is all there—to bursting, yet I can’t get hold of it any more than you can grasp a handful of water…

The worst is that while I’m thus powerless to produce, my imagination is extremely active; whole paragraphs, whole pages, whole chapters pass through my mind.

Everything is there… I’ve thought out a volume a day till I felt sick in mind and heart and gone to bed, completely done up, without having written a line. The effort I put out should give birth to Masterpieces as big as mountains, and it brings forth a ridiculous mouse now and then.”

I can feel Conrad flailing his arms as uselessly as I did with my social worker. I wonder about the reply from whomever he was writing to, assuring him that he was very talented and he should just stick with it. The year is important here—Conrad’s works to that point really were mostly ridiculous mice. The raw material of his incredible life wasn’t in them. But the book trapped in his head in 1898? That had to have been Heart of Darkness. And soon after, Lord Jim. Conrad’s mountains made their way out of his inner maelstrom. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether the deep traumas he witnessed a few years earlier in the Belgian Congo, which led eventually to his masterpiece, may have also been a factor in that internal evasion that kept it from making its way out.

Conrad wasn’t short of brilliance or experience. What he lacked, in that moment, was a bridge between what he saw and what he could say. Reading this letter, not meant for me, I felt seen, held across time. But reading would only take me so far. I needed to understand how this block lived in my own head—and I had a friend who might actually be able to help me map it.

If there’s one person who understands the brain well, it’s Jon Brotchie. Jon is a neuroscientist who specialises in Parkinson’s disease. If you’re a scientist in that field, you’ve worked with Jon’s research—he’s brilliant, and his work on brain function in Parkinson’s has genuinely pushed forward what we know about the disease. If and when there’s a cure, Jon will have had a hand in it.

He and I have talked a lot lately about the nature of art and creativity and how they work inside the head. “I’ve been studying the brain for forty years,” he tells me when I bring up this whole mess, “but it’s only in the last few years that I’ve really started thinking about how the brain actually works. I’ve been looking at receptors and how drugs work on them, but perhaps I’ve been ignoring the interesting questions.”

I’ve never spoken to Jon directly about my own issues. But I have an article to write, and no better brain to help me. I put to him the loose model my social worker had given me, along with scraps of the scientific research I’d been wading through. When I described the physical sensation—my arms flailing in the air, Conrad’s story there but unreachable—something clicked for him. He, too, had always thought of writer’s block as mostly a problem of ideation—of coming up with the beautiful things so that you might get them down.

“What you’re saying instead,” he says, “is that you had all the wild ideas that we think of as creativity, but what was missing was the ability to express them in the form of letters on a page.” It’s not the inability to generate a creative thought, it’s about its output.

A day after we first talk, Jon sends me a rough draft framework. I can almost feel his excitement through the email—he’s onto something, and he thinks it might help me understand what’s been broken. What Jon helped me see is that writing isn’t just one brain function—it’s three distinct networks that have to work in harmony, and trauma can knock any of them out of sync.

The first network Jon explained governs where ideas come from—daydreaming, memory, imagination. This is the part of my brain that was working just fine, churning out stories and connections while I sat there frustrated. This is called the default mode network, which is mostly housed in the brain’s right hemisphere. When poets brainstorm, this system lights up like a nebula.

My block feels different—not a lack of ideas but an inability to form them into something whole.

But having ideas isn’t writing. The second network—the executive control system—handles the actual work of organising thoughts into sentences, monitoring what I’m saying, executing the task of getting words onto a page. This lives primarily in the left hemisphere, and hearing Jon describe it, I recognised exactly what my social worker had identified as executive function breakdown.

The third piece was the most fascinating to me: the salience network, which acts like a traffic controller, deciding which of the other two systems should be in charge at any given moment. When everything works properly, your executive brain switches off during brainstorming so ideas can flow freely, then kicks back in when it’s time to edit and organise. That switching—that’s what the salience network manages.

What I understood from Jon’s framework was that my particular brand of block wasn’t about lacking creativity or even lacking the ability to organise thoughts. It was about the coordination between these systems breaking down. Like having a perfectly good car with a broken transmission—all the parts work, but they can't work together.

Understanding this suddenly made all my little coping mechanisms make sense. That sand timer wasn’t just a focus aid—it was giving my executive network a clear, simple task to latch onto. Those morning swims weren’t just stress relief—they were helping reset the balance between networks. Even those specific songs that sometimes worked weren’t random—the beats were providing sensory cues that helped trigger the right mode switches.

Jon suggested different approaches for different types of blocks. If your inner critic is too loud, overwhelming the creative network, you need techniques to quiet that executive control—meditation, stream-of-consciousness writing, anything to slip past the overseer. If you have ideas but can’t organise them, you need to strengthen that executive function—outlines, rigid time structures, breaking tasks into tiny pieces. And if the problem is switching between modes, you need external cues to trigger those transitions—music, changes in environment, ritual.

This was the first time anyone had broken down my experience in a way that felt not just valid, but legible. Measurable. And once something is measurable, maybe it’s not insurmountable. For months I’d been blaming myself for not being able to push through—maybe the problem wasn’t willpower, but wiring.

Jon even mentioned that devices are being developed—headbands that could monitor your brain and help optimise these networks, eventually maybe even implants that could switch between modes on command. I wonder what Conrad would have made of that. Of course, he made it through without apps or brain sensors. He got the writing written. The mountains, not just the mice.

I don’t feel like waiting for an app to fix it. I lean on my habits, I trust in myself. I watch the sand flow through the glass until I don’t realise I’m not watching it anymore, but moving my fingers across a keyboard instead, allowing the creation of the occasional ridiculous mouse as a reward for my efforts. The grief broke my brain, yes. But brains can be rebuilt. A writer who can’t write is still a writer, as Flaherty said. But a writer who can’t write and finally understands why? Maybe there’s a way back from that.