Avoiding writer's block

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One of my Facebook friends mentioned that he had trouble getting going on writing projects, because he wasn't able to picture how to structure them. I advised him that I thought he was going about this backwards. I told him:

Just start writing. Don't worry about structure at all. Chuck ideas into a document. Once it is full of ideas, print it out. A couple of days later, take it to a café or diner, and look at it while you have a coffee. Make arrows to show where one idea should be moved earlier or later. Then go back to the computer and move the paragraphs where your reading showed they should go. Pretty soon the structure will be obvious: then you just write a few connecting sentences, and you are done!

It's like flipping around the duck-rabbit picture: instead of thinking "I have to have a structure so I can write," you think "I have to start writing, so I can discover what the structure is."

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