The use of prototypes, often the rougher the better, also greatly facilitates overcoming the blank-page problem. Novelist Anne Lamott believes that every good writer writes what she calls shitty first drafts. “The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts,” Lamott writes in Bird by Bird. Just get it down on paper, she recommends. Write like a child, whatever comes to your mind. “All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.
