Why is it is so hard to start a new piece of writing?
After teaching college students, coaching professionals, and writing for businesses, I’ve discovered three simple reasons:
-
You haven’t spent enough time gathering your thoughts or data needed to write.
-
You haven’t scheduled time to write.
-
You don’t know how to get started.
I’ve written other articles focused on the attitude of getting started. I even wrote a whole chapter on the topic in
Write Big, called the “
Ready, Set, Mindset.” Essentially, you have to stiff arm your internal critic by writing fast so you can make the important discoveries needed to write your project. It’s a trick for getting started not for writing an entire work, so use with caution.
In this article, however, I want to talk about what’s underneath the uncertainty of getting started, and I don’t mean your 4th grade teacher’s criticism of your...