POSTED BY SANDRA IN RESPONSE TO A WISDOM FOR WRITERS ITEM ABOUT BREAKING WRITERS BLOCK (BY ALEX):

Fabulous stuff dear ones, nourishment for me and for the writers I work with, thank you!

I do believe one of the most terrifying things known to man/woman is the blank page.

In return I will copy a few things I've found helpful and which I use in my Diving Deeper groups - not as wonderfully hilarious as Burt's.. but.. perhaps something here to inspire.

And, who am I to speak? I have quite a big writer's block - not for blogs or bits and pieces, but I realise I'm in a kind of transition phase, a good one, but not a comfortable one. I blocked half way through a novel ( my first ) - and as I go on, with support from others and my own personal process, I realise that I need to discover the world more, the world I'm writing about… and to fill myself with it as much as my own life stories have filled me.

One simple practical thing which supports me, is to 'prepare' my writing desk the night before. Make it look inviting… and sometimes, if I'm actually not completely blocked, stop writing at a point where I'm 'in the middle' of something, so the next day I'm already juiced.

Well, here are the quotes I've found helpful:

“Do not try to see the words when you stop, just see the pictures better.”
Jack Kerouac.

”When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.  The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out.  But something forces you anyway.”
 - James Baldwin


“Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding. That’s just part of the deal.” 
- David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear

”The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas – for my body does not have the same ideas I do. ”
- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

the next bit is very long, but one of my absolute favourites:

”A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has
found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not
started to say them.

One implication is the importance of just plain receptivity. When I write, I like to have an
interval before me when I am not likely to be interrupted. For me, this means usually the early morning, before others are awake. I get pen and paper, take a glance out of the window (often it is dark out there), and wait. It is like fishing. But I do not wait very long, for there is always a nibble–and this is where receptivity comes in. To get started I will accept anything that occurs to me. Something always occurs, of course, to any of us. We can't keep from thinking. Maybe I have to settle for an immediate impression: it's cold, or hot, or dark, or bright, or in between! Or well, the possibilities are endless. If I put down something, that
thing will help the next thing come, and I'm off. If I let the process go on, things will occur to
me that were not at all in my mind when I started. These things, odd or trivial as they may be, are somehow connected. And if I let them string out, surprising things will happen.

If I let them string out…. Along with initial receptivity, then, there is another readiness:
I must be willing to fail. If I am to keep on writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards.
I must get into action and not let anything stop me, or even slow me much. By “standards”
I do not mean “correctness” spelling, punctuation, and so on. These details become mechanical for anyone who writes for a while. I am thinking about such matters as social significance, positive values, consistency, importance etc…. I resolutely disregard these. Something better, greater, is happening! I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on. I am making something new, something that has not been judged before. Later others–and maybe I myself–will make judgments. Now, I am headlong to discover. Any distraction may harm the creating.

So, receptive, careless of failure, I spin out things on the page. And a wonderful freedom
comes. If something occurs to me, it is all right to accept it. It has one justification: it occurs
to me. No one else can guide me. I must follow my own weak, wandering, diffident impulses.

A strange bonus happens. At times, without my insisting on it, my writings become
coherent; the successive elements that occur to me are clearly related. They lead by themselves to new connections. Sometimes the language, even the syllables that happen along, may start a trend. Sometimes the materials alert me to something waiting in my mind, ready for sustained attention. At such times, I allow myself to be eloquent, or intentional, or for great swoops (Treacherous! Not to be trusted!) reasonable. But I do not insist on any of that; for I know that back of my activity there will be the coherence of my self, and that indulgence of my impulses will bring recurrent patterns and meanings again.

This attitude toward the process of writing creatively suggests a problem for me, in terms
of what others say. They talk about “skills” in writing. Without denying that I do have
experience, wide reading, automatic orthodoxies and maneuvers of various kinds, I still must insist that I am often baffled about what “skill” has to do with the precious little area of
confusion when I do not know what I am going to say and then I find out what I am going to
say. That precious interval I am unable to bridge by skill. What can I witness about it? It
remains mysterious, just as all of us must feel puzzled about how we are so inventive as to be able to talk along through complexities with our friends, not needing to plan what we are going to say, but never stalled for long in our confident forward progress. Skill? If so, it is the skill we all have, something we must have learned before the age of three or four.

A writer is one who has become accustomed to trusting that grace, or luck, or–skill.

Yet another attitude I find necessary: most of what I write, like most of what I say in casual
conversation, will not amount to much. Even I will realize, and even at the time, that it is not
negotiable. It will be like practice. In conversation I allow myself random remarks–in fact,
as I recall, that is the way I learned to talk–so in writing I launch many expendable efforts.
A result of this free way of writing is that I am not writing for others, mostly; they will not see
the product at all unless the activity eventuates in something that later appears to be worthy. My guide is the self, and its adventuring in the language brings about communication.”

William Stafford “A way of writing, Writing the Australian Crawl”