Starting and Stopping

This chapter is not the collection of loose ends it might appear to be at first glance, concerned as it is with groundwork, review, and writing blocks. But groundwork and review are arbitrary distinctions, inseparable from any act of writing assumed to come between them. They are different aspects of a coherent process by which ideas may be clothed in the form of written words. And writing blocks are those occasions when ideas fail to take form and words resist the writer. ¹ So all are part of the psychological setting into which the act of writing must be placed.