Occasionally, I have trouble getting started. Most often, though, I get "stuck" in the middle of something, and I'm not sure how to proceed. Often what I write after the "stuck" episode is bland junk or way out in left field. It's not that I've lost my train of thought so much as I just can't get it down on (virtual) paper even though I have the general outline in my head.

The other day I decided, in the middle of a paragraph, heck, in the middle of a sentence, "I'm just going to stop right here and come back to it later. I've flat run out of words."

It was nearly a week before I returned to that particular writing project. I read over what I had written, put the cursor at the point where I stopped in the middle of the sentence, backspaced over the last two words and the article practically finished itself in about 20 minutes more work.

Why didn't I think of this method before? When stuck, stop, save my work and go do something else. Stopping in the middle of the sentence seemed to be what got me re-started when I returned to it. Maybe I'd been working on it subconsciously in the interim.

Another tactic to defeat the dreaded writer's block.