A professional athlete will take five or ten minutes to warm his muscles and body up before performing his feats of wonder. Then that athlete will do some stretching exercises. After all that, then the athlete gets down to business and either does his full work out or goes to compete. Athletes don’t do all of that cold because the muscles can’t handle it well. Injuries happen to athletes who don’t warm up. Your brain is a big muscle. It needs to be warmed up before doing serious writing.

If you are sitting down fresh and cold to write with no ideas, consider doing warm up exercises. Just sit down and write words, nonsense, whatever comes to mind for a few pages or ten minutes. As you warm up, things will start coming to you. Usually, the first thing that will come is ideas of what else you could be doing with your time. Maybe you ought to be trimming your nails? Gee, doesn’t that plant need watering? (It’s plastic, the answer is a resounding, “NO!”) Ignore those distractions and keep writing. Soon the words will be coming more freely for you, and some of them will even make sense.