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‘I transform “Work” in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real “Work” — of writing’ — Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary   ‘It’s the Demon of Fear I’m actually scared of everything’ — Ingmar Bergman, Bergman Island      PART I   As a writer I often feel like I’m in trouble This is something a writer should never say or admit to Not if they want to continue to write, and not if they want others to think of them as writers who know how to write Writing produces constant dread and anxiety: the feeling that I have to write but can’t That I don’t know how or never will again This is how writing starts This means that writing is not simply what I do, it is also what I cannot do and might never do again Part of the solution to writing for me has been to change and combine disciplines To not be (just) a writer anymore To write using other forms   In the documentary Bergman Island (2006), Ingmar Bergman makes a list of his demons and then reviews each one on camera Bergman admitted to having many fears, but the one fear he said he had never had was the ‘Demon of Nothingness’, which is ‘quite simply when the creativity of [your] imagination abandons [you] That things get totally silent, totally empty And there’s nothing there’   Bergman Island ends with Bergman describing a fear that he claims to have never had, to have never even known, the absence of which his huge body of work (sixty—three films) corroborates to some extent (the way that a corpus of work always corroborates the ability rather than the inability to work), but which nevertheless burrowed into his life in other ways: across his films characters, often artists – both men and women – grapple with their own fear of Nothingness In Bergman’s films, characters wrestle with being abandoned and betrayed not by their imaginations (for fears produce their own fantastic fictions), but by the inability to creatively hone, represent, and endure those imaginations   In Bergman Island Bergman also talks about the Nothingness of death The way