Raymond Chandler had a rule for the days when writing wouldn't come. He'd sit at his desk with a blank sheet of paper and give himself two options: write, or do absolutely nothing. No reading, no answering letters, nothing. He could stare at the wall if he wanted. But the desk was the boundary. He stayed inside it.
He called this "the simple way to force yourself to write," and described it in a letter to a friend as the only method that ever consistently worked for him. There was no trick to it, no special mental framework. Chandler simply refused to offer himself an exit. The boredom would build until putting words on the page became the more tolerable option. Sometimes that took twenty minutes. Sometimes it took most of a morning.
What interests me about this isn't the discipline of it, though that's certainly part of the story. What interests me is what Chandler noticed happening inside that waiting. The longer he sat, the more the internal noise started to quiet on its own. The performance anxiety, the constant comparison to what he'd written the week before. All of it gradually lost volume. And in the space that opened up, sentences started arriving that he hadn't planned and couldn't have predicted.
Most advice about overcoming writer's block treats it as a problem to solve. Find the right prompt, change your environment, switch to a different project. And sometimes those things help, genuinely. But they all share an assumption that the block is an obstacle sitting between you and the work, and that your job is to get around it. Chandler's approach was stranger and, I think, more honest. He treated the block as something to sit inside. He let it be boring and uncomfortable. And he waited to see what happened when he stopped trying to escape.
What happened, more often than not, was that he wrote.
Resistance has a half-life
Steven Pressfield gave this feeling a name in The War of Art. He called it Resistance, capital R, and described it as a force that shows up every single time you try to do creative work. Pressfield's version is almost mythological. Resistance is cunning, impersonal, and relentless. It will use any tool available, including very reasonable-sounding rationalizations, to keep you from sitting down.
But here's the thing Pressfield describes that I think gets overlooked. Resistance is loudest at the start. It peaks in the first few minutes, the first half hour, the moment right before you actually begin. If you can tolerate that initial wave, it loses its grip. It's still murmuring in the background, but it stops being the dominant voice in the room.
I've experienced this enough times that I've started to think of resistance as having a half-life, like a radioactive element that's intense at first and then decays steadily the longer you sit with it. Twenty minutes of terrible, aimless, embarrassing sentences on the page and the feeling is already different. Forty minutes in and you've sometimes forgotten that the block was there at all.
Not always, though. Some days the half-life is longer. Some days you sit for the full hour and nothing much comes, and you close the notebook and that's the session. That happens. The question is whether you come back the next day, and the day after that, and allow the pattern to work over weeks instead of demanding it work in a single sitting.