One word at a time. That’s the answer. I suspect you might want more, and this is one of the times when I imagine me on a couch while you encourage me to open up, at least until the end of your 50-minute hour.

Plus you’re calming me down. I just now, I mean just right now, had an email purportedly asking my writing advice but really giving me some. It was chiefly about how brilliant a writer the sender is. He’s so brilliant that it doesn’t matter he’s telling the wrong person and he’s so brilliant that he didn’t get the message I sent him last time.

And if I think he’s over-selling his writing ability, he is at least talented at writing emails that truly piss you off. What this gets him other than blocked, I don’t know.

So he’s as antagonising as if he set out to be, but as it happens, he’s also about the sixth person to approach me in the last month. Five of them I liked. Either I already knew and liked them, or they were just likeable when they asked what they asked.

Maybe it’s a new year kind of thing, though it already feels like we’ve been in 2022 forever. Whatever reason so many asked my advice out of the blue like this, and whyever they asked me, their different issues were startlingly similar. So startlingly similar that I’ve slowly realised I’ve got the same issues and should listen to myself.

For instance, they and I both know we should be writing more. They and I feel guilty about not having written enough. They all told me how they are now determined to write more, and I want to tell you the same thing about me.

Two of them, by the way, have a lot of ideas and don’t know which to do. Two or three are planning to write for a certain amount of time on certain days. One wanted to know how to write a story that readers are interested in. And all of them guiltily referred to how they haven’t been writing.

I presume they’re asking everyone about this, not just me, but I believe I have some answers. For a start, there is nothing you can do about how you didn’t write yesterday, not a single thing you can do now about how you didn’t write last week.

But you can write today. And really, that’s all you can do.

That schedule idea isn’t bad. Isn’t necessarily good, but it isn’t bad. There’s an element of how if you set up your school exam revision timetable, you feel you’ve accomplished something even if what you’re really doing is postponing the moment you have to work.

And I know this for certain. If you plan to write for two hours every Tuesday and then when Tuesday comes and, for any reason, you don’t, you feel worse than you did before.

If you must feel worse at all, feel it about how if there were some other demand on your time that Tuesday, there is a bit of you that’s relieved. There’s a bit of you that agreed to help or to do something or to be somewhere, just a little bit more easily because it means you can’t write that day.

Sometimes, though, you simply aren’t capable of writing that day and it isn’t for want of trying. You cleared the time, you sat at the desk, and still nothing. Coming up with nothing or coming up only with writing that you immediately loathe, it’s very easily enough to turn these Tuesdays into a weekly demonstration that you’re right, you can’t write, it was stupid to think you could, everybody knows you’re wasting your time, that you’re a constant failure and disappointment who is just embarrassing yourself.

Doesn’t exactly make you rush to next Tuesday’s writing session.

Sometimes you have to walk away and write another day.

So yes, I am arguing that you need to get on with it, you need to be disciplined, I’m really arguing that you should write like this is a job, not a hobby. And at the same time, I am saying you need to be able to walk away – I’m saying you should not write like it’s a job.

I have no problem saying either, and not one single hesitation saying both.

I also have not the slightest little qualm about saying both that it’s great to have lots of ideas, and it isn’t. Ideas are easy, or at least the shiny idea you haven’t started writing yet is always infinitely easier than the one you’re currently tarnishing on the page or the screen.

If you do bounce between your different ideas, leaping off because the current one has reached a hard bit, you are writing, you are working, and you are wasting your time. Write bits of things and you have written nothing. You feel like you’ve put a lot of effort in, because you have, but the result is nothing.

And yet writing bits of your different ideas is practically ideal compared to the other problem when you have lots of ideas. That’s when you don’t write anything at all because you cannot decide which idea to do now, which idea you should be working on.

This is a case where if you have eight ideas, there is no right one, I believe that there are just seven wrong ones. Pick one idea, any one idea, pick it any way you like, then do that one.

Schedule your writing time, while not scheduling your writing time. Instead of vowing you will write for two hours every Tuesday evening, just write for an hour now.

Forget long term plans, ignore them as much as you forget the past where you weren’t writing. For the next one hour, write that one idea.

It’s always one word after another, one hour after another.

I don’t have the answers, but those are the answers.