As for me and my writing, I only need one thing to get going. I discovered it when I was a news writer. To get an article going, all I needed to do was think of the first line. Because, of course, in news writing, you encapsulate the story in the first line. A ready first line meant that I had processed the information enough to write the article, and that I had a workable frame for it.

Later, in grad school, I used the same process. All I had to do was figure out a very rough narrative for the paper: a beginning, middle, and end, each of which logically followed its predecessor. It took a bit of doing at first, but, after getting three graduate degrees, I can now come up with these narratives quite easily. As long as I can cast ideas into a logical narrative progression, everything just flows.

Of course, then I have to revise so it doesn’t suck.

But yeah, deadlines are evil, idea killers. Don’t know why that is, but it is.