Words fail them – frustrated authors every one

WHILE the Romantic poets never had to contend with the exasperating hum of a construction firm's generator, they were not immune from writer's block, which for a variety of reasons, has afflicted famous literary figures down the years.

Samuel Coleridge is recognised as the first high-profile victim of the condition. On the day after his 32nd birthday, Coleridge acknowledged his creative impotence – partly attributable, it is believed, to his opium use – writing in his notebook: "So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month. O Sorrow and Shame … I have done nothing!"

The novelist John Fowles, whose books The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman were international best-sellers, spent the last two decades of his life in seclusion working on his epic novel In Hellugalia. He wrote fragments over several years, but could never progress beyond the planning stage.

Celebrated New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell completed his most acclaimed work, Joe Gould's Secret, in 1964. He turned up at his office almost every day for the next 32 years, but never filed another word. The success of his early work, he complained, had become an "albatross around my neck".

Former poet laureate Andrew Motion revealed last year he "pretty well stopped" writing poetry during the past decade, citing the "sense of being dragged into spotlight" that his position brought.

Philip Larkin, meanwhile, suffered intermittently from the block throughout his life, and wrote little in his final years, complaining: "I haven't given poetry up; poetry has given me up."

Even the most prolific of writers suffer. JK Rowling complained to a New York court two years ago that the stress of bringing a legal action to prevent the release of an unauthorised Harry Potter book had "decimated" her creativity.

Other figures who suffered from an absence of inspiration include Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad and Katherine Mansfield.