Dear Writer,
First, open your document.
If you’re deep in despair— or writer’s block, resistance, procrastination, whatever disguise the demon is wearing today— there are two paths open before you.
The monster that is chasing you is fear. It feeds off of uncertainty, and the more you care about your writing, the more it wants to chase you down. There are two sure-fire ways to defeat fear.
The first is to give up. To play dead. If you stop writing, really stop, it will linger for a while. Anytime you feel like you might just be capable of picking up a pen, it will drift closer and snuffle at your twitching fingers. But if you lie there long enough, it will leave. And you can go on with your life and never fear writing again.
Because you will never write again.
The other way to defeat fear is to outrun it. To write with such determination and regularity that you leave it in the dust. Fear can only survive as long as the fate of your writing hangs in the balance. As soon as you finish, fear has nothing left to feed on. The writing is fantastic, or it’s trash, but it’s done.
So, which is it? Are you going to lie down, or are you going to run?
Now go get some writing done.