I have a few thoughts about writing I’d like to share.

You might call them zen revelations for the aspiring writer.

Zen revelation 1: Writing is as natural as breathing and you knew that a long time ago, but you’ve probably forgotten it

When you were at school, and maybe aged about ten years old, there must have been at least one day when your teacher said ‘write a story’.
What did you do?
Chances are that you sat down at your desk and wrote one.
You didn’t think about it. You didn’t make a pile of notes. You just came up with a story. You may have thought of a title and written your story around that; or used an incident as the starting point, and added the title later.
You wrote your story with a pen, and you made hardly any corrections as you went along. The words just flowed out of you naturally.
You’d read lots of comics, and novels aimed at kids, and watched a few movies. Because of this, you had an instinctive grasp of what a story is, and that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Why can’t you do that now? Why can’t you just sit down and write a story the way you did when you were ten?
The answer is that when you were young, you had no fear of failure or of bad writing, and consequently you were able to tap into your subconscious mind.
You didn’t worry that when you began the story you didn’t know how it was going to end; you trusted your inventive mind to come up with an ending when you got there, or as you went along.
You probably didn’t even know the middle of the story when you wrote the first few paragraphs. The middle probably developed from the opening.
Writing is like speaking. When you speak to me, I don’t make notes and come up with an answer. I just answer, and the response comes to me without thinking about it at a conscious level.
Writing should be the same. You should get into a flow and just write. That’s all there is to it. Just remind yourself how you used to do it when you were ten years old, and do the same thing.
You’re rusty now, as you haven’t done that for a while, so it’ll take your mind a while to get used to that way of working again. But it will adapt. You just have to keep forcing it to make things up for you.
People make sense of the world through stories. That’s why stories exist. They really are as natural as breathing to our species.
Make things up. I can’t stress that enough.