On her blog Writing English, Judy Rose offers advice on what to do When You Can’t Get Started Writing, advice that's in the Manage Your Writing spirit. My favorite paragraph from the posting:
Before we begin, I like to break the task into smaller steps - “doable doses,” as James Taylor calls them in one of his early songs. If writing doesn’t come easily to you, then thinking about the whole thing is too daunting. One little step is “doable.”
My latest book (see right column) has a section called "The Law of the Next Action," a concept that comes from David Allen's Getting Things Done. I write
This is what the five-stage, 12-step [Manage Your Writing] process model does: It takes what is often a scary job of writing a document and breaks it into a series of next actions. You don't have to think of yourself sitting down and spending an hour writing a letter. You just have to spend a couple of minutes on the "next action." . . .
Author John Gregory Dunne, who should know, has written that "writing is manual labor of the mind: a job like laying pipe." Exactly. Nobody can lay a pipeline. All you can do is lay the next length of pipe (17-18).
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