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Many years ago, someone interviewing Ernest Hemingway asked the adventuresome author what scared him the most in life. "A blank sheet of paper," he famously replied. Does that apply to you? If so, then you are experiencing writer's block, which is basically an aversion to writing. All writers block, some more often than others. If you have done much writing, then you know that writer's block usually manifests itself in one of two forms. In the milder form, you sit down to write, then remember you need to: check the air pressure in your car's tires/brush your dog's teeth/do just about anything that will give you an excuse to get out of writing. In the more serious form, you sit down to write, stare at the empty page and suddenly panic, because absolutely nothing comes into your mind. And the harder you try to write, the blanker your mind becomes. In either case, you have to work through the problem. To accomplish that, you need to understand why you are blocking. In a lot of cases, it's due to stress. And, most generally, we cause our own stress by (a) failing to plan before we begin, or (b) trying to write a perfect first draft. No matter what type of writing you do, you should first make a plan or an outline. For non-fiction, your plan should be based on an editor's assignment or on your ideas for a piece you will be pitching to an editor. If you are writing fiction, the plan is the plot of your story. You can scrawl the plan on a legal pad or type it into your computer. The method you use is not important, but the follow-through is. Feel free to adapt your plan as you write your article and learn more about the subject matter or as you write your fiction piece and the characters begin to take over the story. To keep yourself from trying to write a perfect first draft, begin writing or typing, and get as much information onto the paper or electronic page as quickly as you can. Do not worry about the sequence in which you write the information. And forget about correcting your spelling, grammar, sentence structure and other such details. There will be plenty of time later to make your work "pretty. " If you stop the flow to edit or rewrite or polish now, you will drive your creativity away and invite writer's block to move into its place. Ernest Hemingway also once said, "The best writing is rewriting, " and he seems to have done pretty well by following his own advice on that subject. So, avoid writer's block at the beginning of your project not only by planning what you are going to write, but also by getting your information onto the page before you begin polishing and rewriting it. In my next article on this subject, I'll address how to avoid blocking at the middle and at the end of a project. I was actually going to include those subjects in this article, but I just remembered that it's time to check the tire pressure on my Mustang and that it's been a while since I brushed my dog's teeth. custom thesis
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