Writer's blockdown: after a year inside, novelists are struggling to write | Books | The Guardian

"Stultified is the word," says Orange prize-winning novelist Linda Grant. "The problem with writing is it's just another screen, and that's all there is ... I can't connect with my imagination. I can't connect with any creativity. My whole brain is tied up with processing, processing, processing what's going on in the world."

Grant describes waking up in a fog, and not wanting to do anything but watch rubbish TV. Her mind is not relaxed enough, she says, to connect with her subconscious. "My subconscious is just basically screaming: ‘Get us out of this'," she says, so there's no space to create fiction. "I don't have the emotional and intellectual energy to give to these shadowy people to bring them out of the shadows."