Begin before you are ready

Readiness is a moving target. You will feel ready after the research, after the move, after the course, after the children are older, after you have read one more book about how people like you become writers. The page does not require you to feel like a writer. It requires a sentence.

Give yourself two minutes and a rule that the sentence may be bad. Not a session. Not a chapter. Two minutes is too small for the block to organise against. When the timer ends you may stop, and often you will not, because stopping is harder once the cursor has company.

The trap is the preparatory ritual that expands until it fills the hour: the right mug, the right playlist, the reread of yesterday that becomes a rewrite of yesterday. Rituals can be useful if they are short and end at the keyboard. If they are how you avoid the keyboard, they are the block in a nicer coat.

You are allowed to start in the wrong place. Start with the argument in the kitchen, not the sunrise that was meant to open the chapter. Start with the line you are afraid is too odd. Wrong places have a habit of being the right ones, because they are where your attention already was.

Ready is a feeling you get from having begun. It rarely arrives first. If you wait for it, you will wait in good company, and the company will still be unpublished.