Paris, 1923. Hemingway broods over a series of staccato sentences he’s just composed. The next sentence eludes him, although he’s pretty sure it will have something to do with robots, and the page languishes for days. Discouraged and sober, he wanders outside to redress both these conditions.

Perhaps King Henry II, trying to draft an edict denouncing the Archbishop of Canterbury, said it best: “Will no one rid me of this troublesome writer’s block — or at least this priest?”

All writers occasionally suffer a dry spell. Well, two exceptions come to mind. First, there’s Stephen King. Then there’s Moses, whose best-known work, the first five books of the Bible, was originally serialized in The Strand magazine under the title “Don’t Make Him Mad & Other Tales Of Woe.” The man was a writing machine, producing three thousand words a day, although much of it focused on his love of chili fries…