I have been writing for more years than I like to tally; as a child and teenager I wrote poetry, as a young woman I wrote plays and screenplays, and now in middle-age I write fiction. Early on I realized that if the writing was going to happen I needed to make room for it, room meaning not space but time (though space is important too). It takes a long time to train the various parts of the brain to work in concert—the frontal lobe with its nuanced command of language, the hippocampus with its congeries of memory, the amygdala with its strong passions—and eventually to serve up that unique brew a writer seeks. Writing is biological and muscular—akin to athletics in many ways—and habit encourages better instincts, better reflexes, better overall functioning. In my twenties I developed fairly reliable writing habits or, what Alan Bennett in his play about W.H. Auden calls “the habit of art” (which is the play’s title). I learned to write daily, and I learned to seclude myself in the early morning when my creative imagination is most active. This has served me well, in the sense that I have been able to keep writing, honing my craft, producing work which is (hopefully) better and better.

But recently, just after I returned from Zimbabwe, my habit failed me. I had embarked on a new novel earlier this year and had set it aside while I was away. Coming back to it was unexpectedly difficult. I could not re-immerse myself. This had never happened before, or not in this particular way, for so many days on end. I was putting words on paper, but they were not the right words. My sentences held no music. Nothing flowed. The premise seemed possibly stupid, the characters flat. I was second guessing everything I had done so far, everything I was thinking about doing. It was like being struck with a sudden awareness of the apparatus of breathing which makes it almost impossible to breathe smoothly. I was nervous, distracted. I couldn’t sit still. I became hyper-aware of the publishing marketplace, what was and wasn’t selling. I began to use Twitter, but Twitter drove me even more crazy. I felt like the dateless girl at the prom, flat-footed, flat-chested, clueless, conspicuously out of it. I considered therapy. I considered trying to stop writing. I thought how great it would be to unshackle myself from having to mine my imagination and memories, from having to put together rhythmic sentences, from having to produce pages, lots of them, that added up to something that would stimulate and move people. I started looking longingly at the jobs other people did. Wouldn’t it be lovely, I thought, to have a gardening business, something physical and comfortingly repetitive. What about being a baker, or a chef? A bartender, or a waitress?

Some writers do stop writing, I suppose, but it seems to me that most don’t. We can’t stop; we’re addicted to something about the act of writing, to the way it rewards us when it’s going well. Most of us keep returning, for better or worse, to wrestle words onto the page.

A couple of months ago I read a New York Times article about the recent resurgence of psychiatrists using hallucinogens to treat conditions such as depression. One man (a psychologist, I believe) was suffering from depression following his treatment for cancer. He went through a supervised hallucinogenic “trip” from which he emerged profoundly transformed. His anxiety fell away. The experience, he said, taught him in a deep bodily way that his worry was unnecessary, that all he had to do was “show up and be open.” That phrase stuck with me. So simple. So seemingly right. Could this be the solution to my writing problem?

The showing up I could do, I had been doing, more or less. But the being open was trickier to put into practice. How could I force myself to be open? I thought of the advice I give to my students. Do not answer the phone. Do not check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter. Don’t leave the room. Pull the blinds. Lock the door. Ignore the doorbell. Breathe deeply. Let your mind to wander. No one is watching. No one needs you. Play.

And sure enough, back it came, little by little, the habit of art.