About 200 years ago, probably on a dark and stormy night, Mary Shelley gave the world Frankenstein,

and it has lived on in our nightmares ever since.

About the same time, her husband and intermittent and tortured poet named Percy gave us writer's block.

He described creativity as a fading coal, and in one of his most dangerous writings he wrote,

and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

He set the stage for what would soon come after the epidemic of writer's block.

Konnichiwa, it's Nick in Fukuoka, Japan, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

The thing is, there's no such thing as writer's block.

Joan Akicella has a great piece on this in the New Yorker, and in it she describes the evolution of writer's block.

It turns out Percy's poem is writing about getting stuck, spread.

It's spread to the poets, and then it's spread to the novelists.

It's spread to the psychoanalysts, and then it's spread to the people writing screenplays, and then, and then, and then.

So any copywriter, video editor, social media guru, public speaker, whose worth his or her salt, has writer's block.

Because that juicy work, the work we seek to do, the work where no one's telling us how to do it, because it's never been done before.

That work with the fancy snacks and the big prizes, where there are clients and audiences and partners waiting for us to spin something out of whole cloth.

That work, well, we get blocked, we get stuck, we get this melody that we've given a name to, writer's block.

And there's no such thing.

Plummers don't get plumbers block.

The plumber doesn't show up at your house when you have a dripping faucet and say, oh, I don't know.

I'm really stuck, I'm blocked, I'm not sure, do you have any whiskey?

No, there's no such thing as plumbers block.

There's no ditch diggers block, there's no lift driver block.

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