The Seven Secrets of Writer’s Block

BREATHE!

Every three hours (at the least!) take sixty seconds of deep, slow, diaphragmatic belly breathing. And if you aren’t doing this, haven’t tried this…what is your view of the world, your value structure, your beliefs, such that you don’t deserve FIVE MINUTES A DAY to care for your own health and sanity?

That “Five Minute Miracle” is the minimum dose, the “atomic action” that will, if continued and deepened, take you to the goal of transforming stress into energy. There are similar “minimum doses” of other actions, and the point is to make them so small that there is NO rational reason not to do it — just emotional reasons.

In writing, that minimum is “A Sentence A Day.” If you can write a sentence a day, you can write a book in a year, enough to build and progress a writing career. And if you think the math on that doesn’t work out, you simply don’t understand the creative process well enough…yet.

BUT YOU WILL, if you’ll just make this basic commitment. And the first step will be to look at where YOU break down in the sequence of:

1. Writing a sentence a day
2. Writing 1–4 short stories a month.
3. Polishing and submitting 1–4 short stories a month
4. NEVER rewriting those stories (once finished) except to editorial request.
5. Read 10X the amount of writing (approximately a story a day)
6. Repeat this process 100X