I don’t suppose there’s a writer who hasn’t doubted their sanity, much less their ability to write at one time or another. I call it the Why Don’t I Just Take Up Basket Weaving Instead And Put An End To the Frustration Already syndrome.

The answer is always the same: I’m not a basket weaver.

Writing is such a mysterious process on the one hand, and so technical on the other. When you hit a wall it’s sometimes hard to know which way to go—should you hammer away, applying more craft, more discipline, until, by god!, you find an entry point through which you can forge ahead—or is that just never going to happen because what you really need to do at this point is set the thing aside, let it marinate awhile, until you’re ready for each other again…

Unfortunately there’s no one to ask.

I heard Wayson Choy speak to a group once; he said how, in a class taught by Carol Shields, he was assigned a tiny square of pink paper and told to write about it. He hated pink, hated it, and he resisted writing until I guess there was nothing else to do—so, reluctantly, he began writing. As it turned out, what he wrote that day would eventually become The Jade Peony.

His point of course—and it’s been made in other ways by other people, but he’s always the one I think of—is that often the answer we’re looking for, the direction we should take, the thing we should be writing about, lies just beyond whatever we resist most.

So when I’m frustrated to the point I don’t even know what I’m resisting because I’m resisting everything… I take a breath and ‘write colour’. I open my thesaurus, flip to the section on colours and pick one that sounds particularly hideous: zinc sulphide, moleskin, Bismark brown.

If it’s bad enough—and I’m lucky enough—it’s pretty certain to take me someplace interesting that I don’t want to go.