Richard Hugo wrote in The Triggering Town, of poetry: “Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, ‘That’s pretty lucky.’ Nicklaus is supposed to have replied, ‘Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get.’ If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing wild come. Get to work.”
I am a poet first, but these wise words of Richard Hugo’s belong to all writers, without regard to genre. Get to work, get to work. Only by practicing will your craft improve, the writers’ block be held at bay, the words will come easier. If you get a chance, check out The Triggering Town: it is a gem of book with thoughtful insights about the craft of writing and the art of it, and some really wonderful sections of poetry prompts that can easily be used for writing prose, and sparking fiction as well as non-fiction.
Most of what he says in the book is itself a poem, a series of beautifully described contradictions: to be at once arrogant and admit that at least one fourth of what you say is wrong, to continue writing even in the moment you feel closest to quitting, to describe, describe, describe until you have reached the point of numbness and then to describe a bit more past the numbness, to write because that’s what you do, and who you are: a writer.