I believe that the so-called “writing block” is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance….One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing.

I can imagine a person beginning to feel he’s not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that’s surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I’m meeting right now….You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn’t make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you’ve done it.

— William Stafford, quoted in Donald M. Murray, Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), 126.