The novelist Hilary Mantel (twice winner of the Booker Prize and one of the most disciplined writers of her generation) once offered this advice to writers who hit a wall:
“If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.”
She was talking about fiction. But swap “desk” for “piano” and “lost words” for “lost melody,” and she could be talking directly to you.
Getting stuck is one of the most universal experiences in songwriting and every songwriter knows the feeling all too well.
Imagine… You’re mid-song, something isn’t working, and no amount of staring at your notebook or replaying the same four bars seems to help. The instinct is to push through and keep trying but Mantel’s advice points to something most of us know intuitively but rarely trust: sometimes the smartest thing you can do is stop, walk away, and let the song find you.
The catch (and this is the part most people miss) is that not all ways of stepping away are equal. Some will help your song. Some will quietly kill it.
Why Trying Harder Stops Working
Your brain has two distinct modes of thinking, and creative work needs both.
The first is focused mode. This is the analytical, deliberate, editing brain. It’s excellent at comparing options, spotting problems, fixing a chord that doesn’t resolve properly, or tightening a lyric that’s a syllable too long. When you’re revising something you’ve already written, focused mode is exactly what you need.
The second is diffuse mode. This is the looser, associative, wandering brain, the one that makes unexpected connections, that sees the whole picture rather than the details, that generates the fresh idea you couldn’t have arrived at by thinking directly toward it. This is the mode responsible for most of what we’d call genuine creative insight.
Here’s the problem. When you’re stuck and you keep grinding, you’re using focused mode on a problem that needs diffuse mode. You’re applying the wrong tool. And the harder you stare at the blank page, the more entrenched you become in the analytical loop that’s keeping you stuck.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s just how the machinery works. The moment you recognise that stuck feeling for what it is, a signal that you need to switch modes, not apply more effort, you can stop fighting yourself and start working with your brain instead of against it.
What Mantel Is Really Saying
When Mantel talks about opening a gap, she’s describing something very specific. It’s not about resting. It’s not self-care. It’s about creating the conditions for something to arrive.
Your unconscious mind doesn’t clock off when you leave the room. It keeps working on the song, turning over the problem, auditioning possibilities, making connections below the surface of your awareness. This process is real and it’s well-documented.
The issue is that it can’t compete with the noise of active conscious thought. When you’re grinding at your desk, the internal chatter drowns out whatever the deeper part of your brain is trying to surface.
The gap Mantel describes is the space between your last conscious attempt and your return to the work. In that space, given the right conditions, your lost words or your lost chord progression, or the bridge that’s been eluding you can actually get through.
This reframes everything. Stepping away from the song isn’t giving up. It isn’t laziness or avoidance. It’s an active creative strategy.
You’re not abandoning the work. You’re doing the work in a different mode, one that requires you to step back and stop interfering.
The patience piece she mentions is real too. The gap doesn’t fill on schedule. Sometimes the answer comes on the walk. Sometimes it takes a day. Sometimes it wakes you up at 3am. The tolerance for that uncertainty is genuinely hard to develop, especially when you’re working to a deadline or in the grip of self-doubt.
But patience here isn’t passive. It’s a skill.
What Actually Helps
The activities Mantel lists share something specific. They’re absorbing enough to pull your attention away from the problem, but they don’t fill your creative channel with other people’s language. They occupy the grinding, scowling part of your brain just enough to let the deeper process do its work.
Here’s how each one maps onto the songwriting experience.
Walking or any physical movement
This is the classic for good reason. Walking has a rhythm, a sensory texture, a gentle demand on your attention that’s just enough to quiet the analytical loop. There’s no verbal requirement. Your mind wanders. And wandering, for a songwriter, is productive.
Many writers report that the line they couldn’t find at the desk arrives somewhere between the front door and the end of the street. Keep your phone in your pocket, not in your hand. The point is the wandering, not the distraction.
Sleep
This one is underrated and under-used. Sleep isn’t just rest, it’s where consolidation happens. Your brain actively processes and reorganises the material it’s been working with during the day. A song you go to sleep frustrated with will often look different in the morning, not because you’ve thought about it more, but because something has settled.
If you’re genuinely stuck, a nap isn’t laziness. It might be the most productive creative decision you make all day. Keep something to record into within arm’s reach of your bed.
Cooking or baking
There’s a reason so many artists and writers cook. It’s sensory, process-driven, and nonverbal. Your hands are busy. Your attention is loosely engaged. The stakes are low and the feedback is immediate. You’re present in a way that’s entirely different from being present at a DAW or a notebook.
Some of the best creative breakthroughs happen over a chopping board. It sounds absurd until it happens to you, and then you’ll never doubt it again.
Drawing or visual art
Even if you can’t draw, picking up a pencil and sketching something activates parts of your brain that language processing doesn’t touch. This cross-domain shift is surprisingly effective. Something about engaging the visual-spatial mind seems to loosen whatever’s jammed in the verbal or musical one.
You’re not trying to draw anything related to the song. The point is simply to move into a different creative gear entirely.
Listening to music
Note the distinction here: listening is very different from trying to write while listening. Passive engagement with music (putting on an album you love and actually sitting with it) is receiving rather than producing.
You’re inside someone else’s creative world, not trying to build your own.
This can refresh your ear and shift your emotional state in ways that unlock something when you return. The key word is passive. If you find yourself analysing the production or critiquing the mix, you’ve drifted back into focused mode. Let the music just be music.
Meditation or stillness
Rather than filling the gap with another activity, this is about deliberately clearing it. Sitting quietly, breathing, letting thoughts arrive and pass without chasing them, this is essentially what Mantel means by “create a space.” You’re not filling the gap with anything. You’re just holding it open.
Even ten minutes of this can shift the quality of what you come back to the song with.
Exercise
Similar mechanism to walking but with more intensity. A run, a gym session, a swim, the physical exertion creates a neurochemical shift that can break a stuck mood completely. The endorphin effect is real, and so is the simple fact that you can’t think about a difficult lyric very clearly when you’re working hard physically.
Come back to the song when you’re still slightly elevated from the exercise. That’s often a good window
What Makes Things Worse
This is the part of Mantel’s advice that most people gloss over, and it’s arguably the most important.
She’s very specific: don’t make phone calls, don’t go to a party. Not just because you need to rest, but because other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be.
This is the distinction that separates a helpful break from a destructive one. And for songwriters in the current era, it’s more relevant than ever.
Conversation
A phone call, a long text exchange, a chat with your housemate about their day, all of these require you to engage verbally with someone else’s frame of reference. You’re receiving their language, their concerns, their way of structuring the world, and you’re producing responses in real time.
The language channel that your song needs to be running through is now carrying someone else’s traffic.
You come back to the desk and the song feels further away, not closer. The material has been displaced. This isn’t always catastrophic, but if you’re in a sensitive phase of a song, when something is close to the surface but hasn’t arrived yetit can be genuinely damaging to the work.
Social media
This is particularly brutal for songwriting. A scroll through any social platform is a continuous stream of other people’s words, opinions, hooks, and emotional framings delivered directly into the exact space your song needs.
And unlike a conversation, you don’t even get the warmth of human connection in return. It fills the gap and gives you nothing creative back. If you’re stuck on a song and you reach for your phone, you’re making it harder, not easier.
Parties and social events
There’s a reason Mantel mentions these specifically. Social events are immersive verbal environments. You spend two hours listening and talking and navigating other people’s worlds. You come home full of input, none of it yours, all of it sitting in the foreground of your attention. The song, which needed space, has been completely crowded out.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a social life. It means you should understand what a big social event does to an in-progress song and plan accordingly.
Co-writing sessions that stall
Here’s a specific application for songwriters who collaborate. When a co-writing session hits a wall, the group instinct is often to take a break together, go for lunch, have a chat, keep the energy up socially. This almost always makes the return to writing harder.
The better option is to separate. Go for individual walks. Sit in different rooms. Keep the verbal channel quiet. When you come back together, you’re each bringing something fresh from your own internal space rather than a room full of each other’s conversations.
Specific Situations Every Songwriter Will Recognise
You can’t find the right lyric
The line almost never arrives at the desk when you’re staring at it. It arrives in the shower. On the walk. In the moment between waking and fully conscious.
This isn’t magic, it’s just the diffuse mode doing its job. Your role is to step back and let it, then to be ready to catch what comes with a voice memo or a notebook within arm’s reach.
The song feels wrong but you can’t identify why
This is a problem of proximity. You’re too close to hear it as a listener. Stepping away and coming back gives you a version of fresh ears, you hear the song more the way someone else will hear it, and the issue that was invisible from the inside becomes obvious from the outside.
Distance is a diagnostic tool.
You’ve revised the life out of it
Overwriting is one of the most common ways to kill a song. You started with something raw and instinctive. You revised it. Then revised it again. Now it’s technically correct and emotionally hollow all at the same time.
Mantel’s advice applies here as a preventive measure: know when to stop working and step away before the next revision takes out something that was actually working. The edit that feels necessary after three hours at the desk often feels unnecessary after a night’s sleep.
Your ears have gone flat in the studio
Ear saturation is real. After a certain number of hours in a recording or mixing session, you stop hearing accurately. Everything starts sounding fine, or everything starts sounding wrong, and you genuinely can’t tell which.
No amount of tweaking within the session fixes this. The only fix is to leave, do something nonverbal, and come back with ears that haven’t been saturated. This is a technical reality, not an excuse.
Making It a Deliberate Practice
Most songwriters discover this process accidentally, they leave a song in frustration and it resolves itself while they’re doing something else. The shift is in treating it as an intentional method rather than a happy accident.
A few practical ways to do that:
Recognise the signal early. When you’ve been grinding without traction for more than twenty or thirty minutes, that’s the cue. You don’t need to push through to complete exhaustion before stepping away. Recognise stuck when it shows up and respond to it before it becomes demoralising.
Choose your gap activity in advance. When you’re stuck, your decision-making capacity is already taxed. Having to figure out what to do next adds to the problem. Know what your go-to gap activities are before you need them, your walk route, your default album to put on, your kitchen project.
Keep something to record into close by. Voice memos, a small notebook, whatever works for you. The material that surfaces during a gap rarely arrives politely when you’re back at the desk. It comes when you’re still in the gap — on the walk, in the bath, half-asleep. Be ready to catch it without disrupting the state you’re in.
Build gap time into your sessions by design. Don’t treat stepping away as a last resort. Schedule it. Work for a focused period, then build in deliberate gap time before the next session. This is how professional writers of every kind actually work, even if they don’t always call it by that name.
Trust the process even when it feels like you’re not working. This is the hardest part. Lying in the bath mid-afternoon when a song is due feels irresponsible. But if the alternative is another hour at the desk producing nothing, the bath is the more productive choice.
Mantel’s patience isn’t about waiting passively. It’s about trusting a process you can’t directly observe.
In Closing…
The insight in Mantel’s advice isn’t that it’s sometimes okay to walk away from your work. It’s that walking away, when done correctly, is part of the work.
Your lost words, your missing chord, the lyric that won’t come, they’re not waiting for you to try harder. They’re waiting for you to get out of your own way.
The stuck feeling isn’t a sign that you’re doing it wrong. It’s a signal that you need to switch modes, clear the channel, and give the deeper part of your creative mind the space to do what it’s been trying to do all along.
So get away from the desk. Take a walk. Make something and let the music find you but whatever you do… Just don’t pick up your phone.
