We tend to imagine writing begins with inspiration.

A writer has a brilliant idea while on a train, staring thoughtfully out a rain-speckled window. They rush to their keyboard, fingers fly across the keys, and three hours later, they emerge with something spectacular.

This is an excellent system, provided you’re limited to a typewriter or a clay tablet.

For the rest of us, writing is a much messier process.

In fact, most writers I know are mostly just sitting there… and not dramatically either. No rainstorm,  no cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling while they whisper through their fingertips onto the page. Just a person in sweatpants making frustrated noises at a laptop. Sometimes the noises become words, and sometimes they become “GRRRR” typed directly into the document itself.

This experience is most often referred to as writer’s block.

Inspiration.

A lot of writer’s block is not actually a lack of ideas. It’s wanting to know exactly what you’re going to say before you say it.

Unfortunately, writing doesn’t always work that way, which is inconvenient because it means the process works in the exact opposite order from how we’d prefer. We want certainty first and effort second. Writing generally demands the reverse.

Inspiration is like an unreliable coworker. If you wait for it to show up before getting started, nothing gets done. So the next time you’re waiting for inspiration, lower the bar aggressively. Become willing to write garbage—because it’s impossible to revise a blank page. Like an unreliable coworker, inspiration tends to wander in eventually and take credit for the entire project.

The first draft is often less a demonstration of what you know than a process for finding out.

Polish, or the Lack Thereof.

Another source of writer’s block is the belief that a piece should feel finished after one sitting. This expectation survives despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. No one lays a foundation, looks at it, and says, “Well… guess that’s all the house we’re getting.”

Every writer knows what happens when they revisit yesterday’s work: Yesterday’s masterpiece has somehow become today’s rough draft. 

This happens because writing rarely has one right answer, and you’ve spent the last twenty-four hours becoming a slightly different person with slightly different opinions. You might as well allow the process to be a process instead of fighting for something to be polished before it’s ready.

Try writing as if nobody will ever read it, which works because nobody is reading it. It’s a draft. Stretch your legs and enjoy the freedom.

Put Thought to Word.

Before the pieces are on the table, you can’t see the picture.

Try drafting your ideas with as few—or as many—words as come to mind. Don’t worry about grammar, punctuation, organization, or whether any of it sounds intelligent. Your only job is to keep up with your own thoughts. Dump everything onto the page as quickly as possible, with only enough coherence that you can understand yourself.

It will probably be messy. It’s for the best.

Many writers try to organize ideas before they’ve fully articulated them, but it’s a mistake to try to assemble the puzzle while half the pieces are still in the box. Get them onto the table first, then go back and figure out where they belong. You’ll have a much easier time choosing sentence structures, transitions, and the order of ideas once you can actually see—and remember—what you’re trying to say.

Leave It Behind.

Writer’s block won’t always leave you alone after the beginning stages. Sometimes it appears halfway through a single sen–

Never mind.

You know the feeling. You’ve rewritten the same line six times and somehow managed to create six entirely new problems. At this point, many writers might end that sentence with the aforementioned “GRRRR.”

I have a different system. If a sentence is terrible and I can’t figure out how to fix it, I make it bold. That’s it. The sentence remains terrible, but now it’s a future problem. Future Ember is remarkably talented; I leave her all kinds of disasters to solve.

Present Ember, meanwhile, gets to keep writing.

Just Write Something.

At the risk of upsetting every movie montage ever filmed, writing is usually not a lightning strike. It’s an accumulation of small discoveries, wrong turns, revisions, and occasional moments of competence.

Writer’s block will reinvent itself throughout the writing process. At the beginning it sounds like, “I don’t know what to write.” Later it becomes, “This isn’t good enough yet.” Eventually it turns into, “I can’t move on until this sentence works.”

Writer’s block often feels like an inability to move forward. More often, it’s an unwillingness to move forward imperfectly. Perfectionism is persuasive because it sounds responsible. But honestly? It’s just a more sophisticated form of procrastination.

The strange thing about writer’s block is that it often disappears the moment there is something to work on; the lightning strike we imagine at the beginning often turns out to be a reward for getting started.

You can edit a draft. You can improve a draft. You can even bold a draft and abandon it for Future Ember. 

(Future Ember, if you’re reading this, good luck.) 

But first, you have to write one.