"Block Island" -- portion of a cartoon from the June 27, 1994 New Yorker magazine

Randy Cassingham makes the argument: “There is no such thing as writer’s block” and invokes the “10,000 hour rule.”

I used to tell students, “The first million words are just for practice.” But you can count blog posts on your way to the million.

Cassingham’s version of a traditional exercise:

But one day he told me he was “blocked” and hadn’t written anything for weeks. I went over to his house and said, “Want me to fix that for you?” He didn’t know what I was up to, but he definitely wanted help, so I gave him this assignment: sit his ass in front of his computer and start writing — right now! I told him that I would come back in half an hour. Here’s the key to my method: I said if he could think of nothing else to write, he was to type “I have nothing I want to say” over and over and over again, until he had something better than that to write.