Of "Writer's Block" in Bad Fiction

One of the more irritating clichés of the writing life as depicted in pop culture is the ceaseless reference to "writer's block." The writer in question, perhaps in the middle of some project, perhaps after the completion of some project, simply cannot write another word.

Certainly writers do get "stuck" in their writing, for any number of reasons--stress and self-doubt as ever-present as they are unhelpful. Yet we see so much of it in pop cultural depictions of writing because it is so much easier to present to an unsophisticated audience than the multitude of other difficulties that writers face in their work--all as they would much rather present writers having trouble writing than writers who have no problem producing the words, but finding no takers for them, and still less succeeding in making any living from them, precisely because they have been so cowardly about telling the truth about their own business.

Alas, they are not necessarily worse than the practitioners of other profession that way.