Anne Lamott's writing process is a lot like mine; she seems to have trouble distancing herself from her worries and, as a result, can't seem to get anything down on paper. I do like her idea about the one-inch frame, though. Sometimes it's easy to be overwhelmed by page requirements, or grand notions of writing the world's next novel--it's hard to live in the moment and just fill half a page.
The most difficult paper that I've written (yet) was actually about my own writing process. I'm terrible when it comes to writing about myself. To make things worse, I'm pretty neurotic about writing itself. I have to have exactly the right spot, the right drink, the right music...but none of that matters if I'm too keyed up to write in the first place. I spend a lot of time starting and stopping--by the time I'm done writing, I've usually written about five introductions, and amassed a stack of scribblings that just came to me while I was supposed to be doing something else. My house is always really clean when I have something tough coming up, too--it's easy to find anything BUT writing to do.
I don't really know how I finally got over that writer's block. I just started thinking about experiences that I'd had that seemed to symbolize the steps I went through as I wrote. Instead of worrying about the final product, I just put one foot in front of the other and pieced together all of the little bits.
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