The fear of being ordinary

A great deal of writer's block is the suspicion that your particular notice of the world is not worth a stranger's time. You have read better. You can hear, as you type, how ordinary the sentence is. So you stop, and the stopping feels like standards. It is often fear wearing standards as a hat.

Ordinary is the correct temperature of a first draft. The sentences that seem ordinary to you are frequently the ones a reader finds specific, because you have stopped performing and started reporting what you actually see. Performance is what makes prose sound like everyone else's idea of a writer.

Originality is not a stance you adopt. It is what is left when you resist the upgrade — the fancier verb, the more dramatic secret, the twist you saw in a film. Write the quieter true version first. If it is dull, the dullness is information about the scene's event, not about your soul. Change the event. Do not change yourself into a louder narrator to compensate.

Compare yourself to your own last finished thing, not to the best book you read this year. The best book this year was somebody's tenth attempt, edited by professionals, after a draft that would have frightened them too. You are not behind. You are earlier.

The readers who stay with a writer rarely do so because the writer was extraordinary on every page. They stay because the notice was consistent and particular, and because the writer did not keep apologising for it by going silent.