So far, I don’t believe in writer’s block. The things I do believe in are:

• Not having physically much (or any) time to write, if you’re dealing with day jobs, other work, family, friends, dramas, etc. It’s usually possible to find a little time, at least at some stage within a week, but you may not have the energy then.
• Feeling lazy and unmotivated about writing. This might be because you’re mentally not in the right space, because you’re not having much success,  or maybe because you’ve had a burst of recent success and don’t want to take the risk of following up on that.
• Procrastination. It’s so, so easy to convince yourself that other tasks have a higher priority than fiction writing. Well, it’s easy for me to convince myself, anyway.
• Having no pen or no keyboard at hand. Truly, that happened to me a couple of times recently, when I really felt like writing. Or did I really feel like writing just because it was impossible?
• Santa Claus. (The one who lives in Finland, because I met him.)

On some internet wandering recently, I came across a Wikipedia entry about the opposite of writer’s block: hypergraphia.  Apparently it’s not quite a disorder or illness but can be part of one, and it means you have “an overwhelming urge to write”. The Wikipedia page goes on to give examples of people who wrote copious notebooks detailing their everyday life, or wrote the longest novels in the world, and so on. I don’t want to do either of these things, but I must admit that I find it quite easy to write often and at length, as most of the recipients of my drawn-out emails will attest to. But that doesn’t mean it translates into writing what I really want to write – great fiction.

In any case, what all this rambling is meant to get to is this: I don’t have writer’s block. I might have been procrastinating a lot recently, a bit lazy and a bit busy, but I’m not blocked. I don’t entirely rule out the possibility that I might feel that way in the future, but I’ll go back to my very first point: I don’t believe in writer’s block. Do you?