Goodreads asked Suzanne M. Wolfe:

How do you deal with writer’s block?

Suzanne M. Wolfe This is a hard one to answer. Writer's block can come from many sources, not all of them identifiable to the writer. But I can give one example: when I was in the early stages of writing "The Confessions of X" I kept beginning the first chapter and couldn't get anywhere with it. I couldn't find the concubine's "voice" at all. This persisted for months and, eventually, I got so discouraged I kind of shut down and developed full-blown writer's block. But I still kept sitting down at my computer to write even if I came up blank. Then one day, the thought came to me that I had to make the narrative a retrospective so that the "voice" was an older, wiser, and more educated "voice" than merely the voice of a young, illiterate mosaic-maker's daughter. Once this clicked, I sat down and wrote the first chapter in a single sitting. The floodgates were opened and I was off. This is an example of a technical narrative problem. But others can include health, exhaustion etc. which can "block" the writer.

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