take a few deep breaths, put your pulse rate into second gear, and deliver a supply of oxygen to the brain.

do not pour the clay of your thoughts into the hard mold of some personal writing style that you are determined to have.

Strive instead to write well and without self-consciousness.

I love writing. It’s getting started that I abhor. I tell you this so that you won’t feel alone. You probably go through similar hell before you write. Almost everybody does. The way to eliminate most of these traumas is to write in large blocks of time rather than to try to write for ten minutes here and there.

Style is your writing. It is inexorably knotted to the content of your words and the nature of you.

“Why am I writing this?”

One common mistake you should be aware of is the writing of two or three leads in the same story. Often a writer creates a good lead and then repeats all the information in the second paragraph, and again in the third. This is from an unpublished article on dog parks:

Your lead should give readers something to care about before it gives them dry background information. “Something to care about” usually means one of two things. Either you give the readers information that affects them directly, or you give them a human being with whom they can identify.

A lead should be provocative. It should have energy, excitement, an implicit promise that something is going to happen or that some interesting information will be revealed. It should create curiosity, get the reader asking questions.