A playful start may get you hard at work before you know it.
Time Yourself. Set your watch, phone alarm, or egg timer, and vow to draft a page before the buzzer sounds. Don’t stop for anything. If you’re writing nonsense, just push on. You can cross out later.
Slow to a Crawl. If speed quotas don’t work, time yourself to write with exaggerated laziness, maybe a sentence every fifteen minutes.
Scribble on a Scrap. If you dread the blank paper or screen, try starting on scrap paper, the back of a list, or a small notebook page.
Begin Writing What You Find Most Appetizing. Start in the middle or at the end, wherever thoughts come easily to mind. As novelist Bill Downey observes, “Writers are allowed to have their dessert first.”
State Your Purpose. Set forth what you want to achieve: To tell a story? To explain something? To win a reader over to your ideas?
Slip into a Reader’s Shoes. Put yourself in your reader’s place. Start writing what you’d like to find out from the paper.
Nutshell It. Summarize the paper you want to write. Condense your ideas into one small, tight paragraph. Later you can expand each sentence until the meaning is clear and all points are adequately supported.
Shrink Your Immediate Job. Break the writing task into small parts, and tackle only the first, perhaps just two paragraphs.
Seek a Provocative Title. Write down a dozen possible titles for your paper. If one sounds strikingly good, don’t let it go to waste!
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Record Yourself. Talk a first draft into a recorder or your phone. Play it back. Then write. Even if it is hard to transcribe your spoken words, this technique may set your mind in motion.
Speak Up. On your feet, before an imaginary cheering crowd, spontaneously utter a first paragraph. Then—quick!—record it or write it out.
Take Short Breaks. Even if you don’t feel tired, take a break every half hour or so. Get up, walk around the room, stretch, or get a drink of water. Two or three minutes should be enough to refresh your mind.