Writing time is scheduled into my day. In my mind, squeezing out the writing should not be too difficult. But it always is, at the start, at least. Once I get going – and this takes some going around in circles – then I am in the zone, in flow, and it’s like I am sailing on a river of lemonade, with lollypop trees on the banks. Well, not really, but it feels good, and when I’m in that moment, it’s as though I can write anything. Which mostly I can’t, but that just serves to illustrate the kind of high I’m on.

What often happens is that this moment in my day is usually squeezed in at the end. It does not take me very long to get through it. Half an hour, or an hour, to produce around 500 words of prose. But because I have been prioritising other activities before the writing, or I have been avoiding getting down to it, I am usually left with not much time, hence the rush to get the 500 word minimum down. And perhaps that time constraint helps me just a little. Still. I really would like to get an earlier start.

One strategy that gets me thinking earlier about the writing, and that generates ideas is to do the morning pages ritual (Cameron 1998). Honestly, most times I sit down to the pages, my mind is blank, or buzzing with so many thoughts it’s hard to know where to start writing. But incredibly, after a page or so, as the pen glides along the paper (and I always use a lovely pen, ’cause I love lovely pens), ideas come, seemingly out of nowhere. And as I round the corner on the morning pages, suddenly I have all these options for my writing for the day.

So for anyone who feels too flat to write, or doesn’t know what to write about, or is reluctant to confront the writing because of fear it will stink, my advice is to sit down to three pages of free-flow, stream-of-consciousness writing. There is no guarantee here. The writing that follows may still stink. But my experience has been that squeezing out more words on a more consistent basis will result in an exponential decrease of the stink factor (don’t quote me on the maths).

Cameron, J 1998, The right to write: an invitation and initiation into the writing life, Macmillan, London