The blank page is not waiting for your best sentence. It is waiting for any sentence.
I used to open a draft and try to write the opening line the way it would appear in print. Twenty minutes later I had three words and a growing suspicion that I had nothing to say. The fix was humiliating in its simplicity: write the bad version, all the way to the end, and refuse to look back until it is finished.
Why the bad draft works
A first draft is not a small version of the finished piece. It is a different object entirely. Its only job is to find out what you actually think, and thinking happens on the page, not before it.
Once the shape exists, editing becomes a craft problem instead of an existential one. You are no longer asking whether you have an idea. You are asking which paragraph to cut.
A practical rule
Give yourself one uninterrupted stretch, no more than forty minutes, and do not use the delete key. Whatever survives that session is raw material. Come back the next morning and be ruthless.
