“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy. “

Anne Lamott

“The best advice I know to give is to learn to put up with boredom and frustration. You have to sit through the dull times when nothing’s coming and stay there, for however much time you’ve given yourself to write, even then. It doesn’t have to be all day that you do this – it could be an hour, two hours maybe – but the ability to just stay there in the face of soul-wearying emptiness, that has to be developed just like any muscle. Because that’s what imagination is: a muscle, and it has to be worked out. So you sit there in the face of nothing, or you write gibberish you know you’re going to toss the next day. But you stay there. You work at it. You fill the time. And gradually, the empty days grow fewer, and the frustration periods shrink. You never lose them entirely, but they shrink.”

Peter S. Beagle