I’m sure every writer has been there. You’re drained. You don’t want write. In fact, you don’t want to do anything at all. But you’ve told yourself you must. Perhaps you set yourself a word count goal for the day, or you aim to write a specific number of days per week, or maybe you owe your readers a blog post…

You open your laptop and there it is.

The blinking cursor on the blank page.

It sits there, almost mockingly, like a heartbeat. Reminding you with every blink what you should be doing. What you can’t seem to bring yourself to do. Instead you watch it hypnotically, like if you stare at it enough the right words will just magically come to you. Except they don’t.

So how do you break out of the haze? How do you do what you know needs to be done, even though the right words just don’t seem to want to flow? There’s really only one answer. If the right words won’t come, then start with the wrong ones.

Just start anywhere. Write something terrible, but keep writing long enough that you give it the chance to become good. Even if that particular piece of writing will never see the light of day or win any awards, it’s a matter of unblocking yourself. Of allowing your fingers to flow across the keyboard or the page. It’s about honoring the craft and your talent.

You can do it. I can too.

Editing update: For anyone following along with my editing challenge, I did make some progress though not as much as I would like. (Is it ever??) I managed to edit… 38 pages. Only 197 more to go. I have two and a half weeks. Can I do it?