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Start with something simple and true


There's an old story about Ernest Hemingway. Faced with a bad case of writer's block he overcame it by telling himself, when faced with the dreaded blank page, to begin by writing something simple and true.

I often remind myself of this, especially when faced with the difficulty of writing about a complicated subject.  When complexity IS the block, start with something simple and true.

Not long ago, for my monthly newsletter, the first issue of the new year 2026, I had given myself the challenge of writing a brief item about artificial intelligence. Then I froze.  I'm not an expert on the field.  I know of coding only what a late 1970s course on APL could teach me.  [If you really ARE into computer science, you're giggling at that sentence.) 

So I started with this sort of intentional simplicity.  "The year 2025 may go down in history with a lot of labels." It may indeed. Getting just a little braver having taken that step, I continued, "But I, for one, would insist that one of those labels should be 'peak year for confidence in AI.'"

And THAT got the ball rolling.  Block broken. Confidence in AI openly doubted -- the admission meant that MY confidence in myself was restored.  That newsletter item, and yesterday's post here, and a fair amount of other writing I have done since, has been the water flowing through this broken dam. 

Thank you, Ernest. 


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  1. HenryMarch 12, 2026 at 7:30 AM

    Hemingway wrote fiction, so he might have had a writer’s block when he didn’t know how to start his story or how to proceed with it. I write only nonfiction, and I’ve never had writer’s block. That is because, when I’m writing nonfiction, I know what I want to say. Choosing the right words might be a problem, but I can work on that; it doesn’t create a writer’s block.

    It seems that, when you decided to write about AI, you didn’t know what you wanted to say. You had picked a subject to write about of which you knew little about. If I were ever in that situation, I'd research the subject and then, knowing something about it, I don't think that I'd have writer's block. But I can't imagine being in that situation, because I write only when I have something to say.

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    1. ChristopherMarch 12, 2026 at 10:09 AM

      When I am writing nonfiction, there is often a block created NOT by the idea that I don't know what to say (never true), nor by the fact of my ignorance (always true, but easy enough to address in most instances). The block is the presence of too much that might be said. Various possible ledes all competing to be THE lede. This was the situation with AI. The rule of starting with something "simple and true," with a focus especially on the simple part, since all the competitors would be, so far as I know and am concerned, true. Suppose I wanted to write about a certain recently-initiated war. Starting right off with a statement about the Strait of Hormuz and the amount of hydrocarbons that pass through it in peacetime? That is a possibility, might lead to something interesting, but really isn't simple. How about something about Donald Trump's "no forever wars" pretenses? Again, it has promise, but only if I want to continue down a particular path, and other paths may press on me. How about "Killing schoolchildren is wrong"? Would lead to a very different piece and is a lot simpler than either of the other two. When I cure myself of writers block it is by getting to something like that.

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