This week I learned that when the legendary American writer, Joan Didion found herself blocked, she'd physically tuck away her manuscript to let it gestate. I was viewing a documentary, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, produced by her grandniece, Annabelle Dunne, in which her editor, Shelley Wanger happens to disclose this eccentric strategy.

"If she's feeling stuck on something, she'll put it in the freezer… The manuscript, in the freezer, in a bag." It's the kind of detail that really stands out. I imagine her, a smallish woman, cigarette in one hand, piling her stack of freshly typewritten pages, then, cigarette in mouth, shoving them into a large zip-lock bag. She walks to her refrigerator, and shelves the pages, perhaps with companion manuscripts. It intrigued me to think of the synchronous moment when she might have decided to return to the freezer to retrieve a particular manuscript because she was now ready to take it forward, because she had unclogged the block.