There’s No Such Thing As Writer's Block

From Mike Long’s e-newsletter:

Just do it ... It’s easier to re-write than to write, even if that first draft seems like junk ...

We often find that as we begin to write, what comes out isn’t as good as we’d like. There’s a reason for that: first-round writing sounds better in your head than it looks on the page. That in turn is because it’s more about how you want the reader to feel than how you’re going to get there. On the page, you try to recreate feelings with mere words. No wonder what we write doesn’t live up to our expectations: it never could!

But what seems like bad news is really good news, and it’s in total violation of conventional wisdom: there is no such thing as writer’s block. Writer’s block is only the fear that what you put on the page won’t measure up to the pretty ideas in your head. And now that you know it can’t, at least not the first time it hits the page, you are free to begin. You’ll fix things later, because that’s how real writing gets done.