If you can’t find something you’ve already written that you’re really interested in using for one of your [[revision projects]], you could just go ahead and write something real quick! To dig into the revision process, the first draft can be as rough as anything, so there’s no pressure to “perfect” it before you start to play around with the process. You could even get up early one morning, set yourself a timer or a word count goal, and just write whatever comes to mind. If you do this (I suggested early morning because that’s when it works best for me, but YMMV) with a genuine commitment to just keep going one word after another, without stopping to think too much, and if you do it for long enough (750 words is the sweet spot for me), you may be surprised to find the seed of something interesting, or even a sapling of something interesting, emerging out of it. Then BAM, you have something to tinker with in revision mode! That first “brainstorm mode” part is fun, because it really is anything goes. As [Dorothea Brande](https://drive.google.com/open?id=18E11HpSt_bDUUemwvfW2iYgdJVLgH4N2&authuser=mschulte%40waukesha.k12.wi.us&usp=drive_fs) says, anything at all other than pure nonsense will work: ## TOWARDS EFFORTLESS WRITING > Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility. > There is not much to be said for the recommendation, so often heard, to serve an apprenticeship to journalism if you intend to write fiction. But a journalist’s career does teach two lessons which every writer needs to learn—that it is possible to write for long periods without fatigue, and that if one pushes on past the first weariness one finds a reservoir of unsuspected energy—one reaches the famous “second wind.” > The typewriter has made the author’s way more rocky than it was in the old days of quill and pen. However convenient the machine may be, there is no doubt about the muscular strain involved in typewriting; let any author tell you of rising stiff and aching from a long session. Moreover, there is the distraction set up by the little clatter of keys, and there is the strain of seeing the shafts continually dancing against the platen. But it is possible to make either typing or writing by hand second nature, so that muscular strain will not slow you down or keep you from writing. > So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant. > The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can—and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before—begin to write. > Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before, a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of early morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically. The excellence or ultimate worth of what you write is of no importance yet. As a matter of fact, you will find more value in this material than you expect, but your primary purpose now is not to bring forth deathless words, but to write any words at all which are not pure nonsense.” – from *Becoming a Writer*, by Dorothea Brande Remember, words are cheap! Don't treat them as if they are too precious! Just *do something* so you will be able to *change it.* (Such [great advice](https://allenpike.com/2023/do-something-so-we-can-change-it) in so many domains.)