Writer's Block or A Void in the Writer?

The writer can be a difficult creature, and it can be difficult to be you if you are a writer. It's not just the career that is difficult to manage, it's the self. The writer cannot write in a vacuum, for nothing can survive in a vacuum and no-one can exist all alone, as a great writer of the modern age has written. A writer might start one novel, get it nearly finished, and then scrap it entirely because it lacks the edge, or the content just isn't powerful enough, or the writer finds that the story is not the one that he wants or, more likely, needs to be telling. Many cannot comprehend how such a process could work within one's mind; after all, how coudl one bear to just throw away something that he had poured his soul into for months or a year or more?

It is possible, also, to have your life disrupted as a writer in such a way that you cannot do your work. If a writer is going through a painful divorce or is grieving some close personal lost, that negative energy can shut down your entire creative process. Most people do not understand this kind of thing, for they are used to being able to go to work and not have their work all that directly attached to their personal life. Sure, everyone might have to have a few days off for something of a deep loss, but for the writer stress and anxiety and grief can shut down everything. Work is not an escape for writers, it is intimately entwined with their lives and entangled with their purest emotions. It is an expression, not just a j-o-b. The writer pours himself onto the page, sometimes for hours at a time, and this activity can become choked to death by grief.