Writing is difficult, whether it is academic or other writing. Writing is difficult for novices and difficult for experienced writers. If you find writing difficult, that is not because you’re stupid or you can’t do it, it is because writing IS difficult.

Though, to be fair, writing is not always difficult. Writing stutters and stops, starts again, goes round in circles, frustrates and annoys, then one day it starts to flow. Maybe for a sentence or two, a paragraph or two, a page or two; maybe for hours, even days, you are in the zone and writing pours out of you. It feels GREAT.

Then the flow stops. This can feel really horrible, like being forced to leave in the middle of a party you were really enjoying, or a power cut just as you were about to make a level-up move in a video game. People have used all sorts of metaphors to describe the feeling of loss, from “my muse has left me” to “I have writer’s block”.

But – and I cannot stress this enough – This. Is. Just. How. Writing. Works. A piece of writing is like a fish in a river. It hatches upstream, close to the river’s source, and wants to swim downstream to the sea. There are shallow rocky parts where the little fish has to negotiate lots of obstacles in its path. There are shallow smooth parts where the little fish can swim though the water never reaches any depth. There are meanders where the water goes a long way round before it gets back on track, which is tiring for the fish. There are weirs where the river can reach a considerable depth behind the weir but only a little of the water can flow over at a time; this means the growing fish can spend time feeding in the deep areas before heading over the weir and back into the flow. There are dams which create great lakes that don’t look like rivers at all and through which the growing fish has to swim a long distance and then find its way through or over the dam and, again, back into the flow. And then there are estuaries, where the fresh water of writing meets the salt water ocean of publications.

The shallow rocky parts of the river are like the start of writing a new piece of work: it’s rocky and full of obstacles. The shallow smooth parts are like initial short patches of flow: quicker but without much depth. The meanders are what happen when we’re writing our way into a piece. The weirs are the places where some flow has been happening and then the fish gets stuck for a while, and the dams are the places where more flow has been happening and then the fish gets stuck again, perhaps for a longer time. Some fish see other fish swimming past them. But determined fish know that being stuck is temporary, that if they keep trying to find a way they will eventually get back into the flow and closer to the ocean they crave.

The estuary is also a difficult place to be. The tides of rejection and acceptance, of useful and unhelpful peer reviews, of tortuous production processes, of favourable and critical reactions, come in and out, in and out. Even though the fish is quite big now, water flowing in different directions is a new experience, and the fish can feel buffeted by the changing tides. Some fish don’t make it through the estuary, many don’t make it through unscathed, but most of those who do make it through learn useful lessons from the experience about how to survive in the great ocean of publication.

The mass movement of ideas from human brains to publications is similar to the movement of fish born in rivers far inland who migrate down those rivers to the sea. When ideas are moving towards the sea, they are all going in the same direction so they don’t have much chance to notice each other. When they are in the open sea they can swim in all directions and so find other ideas with which to make new ideas.

I suspect I may have extended this metaphor as far as it can reasonably go, and that introducing, say, sharks, or chips/fries, would not be helpful. But I do think it’s a metaphor that may be useful for some people. Writing is also – and this is not a metaphor – a job, and a job is something you have to do whether you feel like it or not.

I don’t believe in ‘writer’s block’. I think it’s an excuse which appeals because it shifts the problem from the writer to the ‘block’. I think it’s much more likely that a writer doesn’t, or feels they can’t, write because they are bored with the writing they are doing, or they fear failure (or success), or they are sabotaging themselves, or too much of a perfectionist, and so on. If you think of your writing as a migrating fish, that fish will keep on going regardless of what might get in its way, until it reaches the sea or dies in the attempt. Dying in the attempt does happen to some pieces of writing, for all sorts of reasons, such as poorly articulated ideas, broken collaborations, or simply a writer running out of steam. Some people conceptualise experiences like this as failures, but I think they are more useful when conceptualised as learning opportunities, because what we learn from our experiences of pieces of work dying, as well as from experiences of our work being published, can all help us to write better the next time.