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Goodreads asked Neil Pavitt:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Neil Pavitt It’s easy to read something well written and be intimidated, thinking
you could never write something like it. But just because something is effortless to read, it doesn’t mean it was effortless to write. Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was happy with it. He confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

One of the ways to fight the feeling of being blocked is to think about what you’ve achieved previously. Say you make a commitment to yourself to write a weekly blog. Once you’ve written one and it was okay, you will be able to do another one. The trouble is all this self-doubt starts to come in before you even start to write the second one. You begin to think you won’t know what to write about.

But rather than think about it, give yourself an hour and sit down and try to work out what you can write about. Write any ideas down even if they seem rubbish. If you do get stuck, read. Read books, magazines or online articles. You’re not trying to steal ideas; you’re looking for a fire starter.

The most important thing is to stick at the task for an hour. Even if at the end of the hour you feel like you’ve got nothing, that hour will have been invaluable; you will have fed your unconscious and ideas will come later on.

From my book 'Brainhack'

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