Late last year I lost the will to write. The will to live had long since fled, frankly, but when the will to write departed, I knew that I was in trouble. I still had the desire, but all faith in there being even the tiniest point to it all had gone.

That doesn’t mean I stopped.

In the same way as I forced myself to get up, get washed and dressed and fed; I forced myself to sit at the keyboard and press the keys.

I’ve read that when Katherine Mansfield was first given the chance to devote herself to writing, she was blocked. Embarrassed to admit it, she dutifully sat in her room and worked all day. She typed, repeatedly, ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’ I can’t recall how long that lasted; eventually, though, a story formed and she really started to write.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron recommends automatic writing – as soon as you wake up each day, write. Amy Olive, of Ripping Pages fame, tells me that when she does this she gets some delightfully quirky results. Cameron herself said that over the course of weeks and months of ‘Morning Pages’ she developed a character who then became the protagonist of a novel.

Me? I do ‘Morning Pages’, yeah, sure. But although I have the ferocity to force myself to write against my will, I don’t have the ability to force myself to write before porridge. So I do my twenty minutes of sowing mental wild oats while eating cultivated ones (with honey, yum, yum). Often the dreams that flew from me on waking return as I’m writing to enthral me again. Many times I’ve worked out how to edit a story, develop a character, revise a poem or untangle a contorted plot as I sip tea and enjoy breakfast. I rehearse the speeches I should never make, the arguments I should never have and the self-justifications that convince no one but myself. And most of the time I relate the boring quotidian details that make up life.

It’s still writing though. Of a sort. As is what I do at work. As is the diary I write to chart the training of my horses. And the emails I write to friends.

None of this compensates for the real act of story-telling, poetry writing, literary creation – but they are a means of keeping the machine oiled. In each case you’ll find a structure – however rudimentary and amorphous; you’ll find selection process – the choice of what is relevant or interesting; you’ll find the occasional nicely turned phrase or fluent description.

Most importantly, all these activities have a ‘just do it’ quality about them which you can utilise when the going gets tough. Do it, get through it; on the other side you’ll be stronger. Look, if you can’t be bothered to write an email to a friend (even to explain why you can’t write), then who are you kidding that you’ll ever be bothered to finish that novel you started three years ago?

As for what I forced myself to write during those especially bleak weeks, it turned into the longest piece I’ve written. A novella; 20,000 words, no less. It’s not great. Scrub that: it’s not even good. The plot’s absurd, the characters contrived and the descriptions clichéd. There’s only one scene that’s at all bearable – and I read that at January’s Ripping Pages Open Mic Night.

Yes, ‘The Thumb’ is rubbish – but I read that out because, amongst my albeit limited oeuvres, it’s one of the things of which I am most proud. I’m proud of it simply because I did it; I did it against the odds.

March’s message then is simple: go back to your desk and write.