Some­where, in this clonk­ing great barn of a house, is a huge box of books all about writ­ing. One of these days I’ll find it.
I expect you’ve met pro­cras­ti­na­tion — one good trick is to read books about writ­ing as one’s courage ebbs.

All my life, I’ve been fright­ened at the moment I sit down to write. Mar­quez
It’s really scary just get­ting to the desk – we’re talk­ing now five hours. My mouth gets dry, my heart beats fast. I react psy­cho­log­i­cally the way other peo­ple react when the plane loses an engine. Fran Lebowitz.
I suf­fer always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amaz­ing the ter­rors, the mag­ics, the prayers, the straight­en­ing shy­ness that assails one. John Stein­beck.
Blank pages inspire me with ter­ror. Mar­garet Atwood.

These quo­ta­tions are taken from a book that was on the shelves at my last yoga week in the hills north of Rome– I had to copy the entire book overnight on my tiny lit­tle Asus which made me feel very like Shrek, with fin­gers like cricket bats.

The book is called ‘The Courage to Write’ by Ralph Keyes and I really rec­om­mend it. He deals with the whole prickly issue of why, know­ing that writ­ing is the best thing on earth — cosy insu­la­tion against lone­li­ness, mean­ness, bureau­cracy, tragedy; the path of dis­cov­ery yield­ing unex­pected trea­sures and hor­rors; grip­ping per­sonal archae­ol­ogy and effec­tive exor­cism of demons; a way to poke about in an absorb­ing hornet’s nest with­out being inter­rupted or told off — it is so damned dif­fi­cult to get on with it.