Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night. A description of breaking out of writer’s block | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Harriet Vane in the silence of Oxford. Something comes “back to her that had lain dumb and dead ever since the old, innocent undergraduate days. The singing voice, stifled long ago by the presence of the struggle for existence…began to stammer a few uncertain notes. Great golden phrases, like the great carp from the depths of the pool, swam up out of her dreaming mind.”