Lavatories block, airline check-ins block, freeways block, writers block. So here are ten more jewels of anti-block wisdom, things that work for me. 1- Writer’s block does not exist. Figment of the imagination. That being so, no reason to stop writing. 2- Don’t take yourself seriously. Like trying to write Great Literature, Something Meaningful, The Great Armenian Novel, or the one that Tom Hanks will go bananas over, option for three hundred grand in used bills. It is a lost cause. You are choking yourself before you write your first sentence. Just write. Write anything. Put a mark on the page, and you are on your way. Greatness is of no consequence. End of the day, you have no say in the matter; it’ll be decided much later, way out of your control, after you’ve bought the ranch. 3- Get mad. Politicians, Lou Dobbs and gas stations are a sure bet. Darfur is also good. Celebs discovering, just as their ratings start sliding, that they had been sexually molested in infancy, or that they are suffering from extreme depression, thoughts of suicide, need lots of rehab- that`s good for least a dozen hot chapters. Or that twit in the silver Beemer, cut you up on the freeway just now. Do something terrible to him/her/them/it in the next chapter. Make it gory. Have them get arrested in an airport restroom for rubbing shoes or for not starting a brush fire in Malibu. Whatever. Anything that’ll get you back on line. 4- Throw the cat among the pigeons/a spanner in the works/Hillary and Obama in the same stalled elevator. Kill off your main character or his/her lover/spouse/aunt/insurance broker/parent/dealer/literary agent. Then you will have to write your way out of it. Works every time. Remember Raymond Chandler’s guy with a gat and Bix Beiderbeck playing his horn in sync with the telephone wires. 5- Set yourself a deadline. “I gotta get this book/chapter/screenplay/page/ sentence/word/check for the IRs written by…’(give yourself a tight but feasible deadline, dummy, not next year). 6- Give yourself a break. Have something else going on in your life, preferably in your writing life. I mean, goofing off to perfect your putting, or your dry martinis is not on, old chap. If you are writing a novel, let’s allow, have a short story project going on at the same time. Short stories can be knocked off in a morning, or while you’re taking a dump. They help you chill out- the short stories, not the dump- great exercises in keeping it short, sweet, plenty rhythm (maybe it is all about dumps, on second thoughts). Let’s work downwards here, in terms of length (as the actress said to the Bishop). For instance, if you are into short stories, do blogs, send them to those luvly folk at Amazines.com. If your thing is blogs, drop down a notch, have a go at one-word Japanese poems. If your specialty is one-word Japanese poems, try writing for monks who have taken the vow to never read a word. The whole idea is to notch down the stress level, give your creative juices a vacation. (Don’t you just love that Mose Allison line, Your mind is on vacation, but your mouth is working overtime?) 7- Which brings me to songwriters, torch singers, blues shouters, rap artists, country crooners. If you are stumped for a line, or a title, or a conversation, or just something cool, or, for crying out loud, a whole novel, go listen to a drop of Cole Porter, Aznavour, John Lennon, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leonard Cohen, JJ Cale, Kris Kristofferson, Serge Gainsbourg, Norah Jones, and all the others. Man, did they ever know how to turn a phrase. 8- If you are blocked because of a rejection slip, a lousy comment, a total trashing, don’t go out get wasted; fergettit. You heard. Forget it. First of all, there is criticism and there is criticism. The rarest is constructive. The most common is called private agenda. Lotta wannabe authors out there like to take their frustrations out on writers- especially first-timers. Second, getting slammed comes with the territory. Imagine what they told James Joyce. Then, remember that, as a creative artist, you are precious. Unlike so many who shall be nameless, you make something out of nothing, out of thin air. You don’t just take, you give back. You dare to let it all hang out. You dare to put that first word on a piece of paper or a blank screen. You dare to believe that you have something valuable to say. So, hang on in there, you shall overcome. Above all, don’t let anyone’s private agenda stop you for one second. The sweetest revenge is a neat sentence. 9- Don’t let the rules of so-called ‘creative writing’ block you. Go ahead, end a sentence with a preposition if it makes you feel good. Start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’ if you wish. The great thing about rules is that, once you have more or less mastered them, you can have a ball breaking them. Elmore Leonard has this thing about not writing about weather. I mean, he is a The Man but God he ain’t, so if you want to write a thousand pages bout rainsqualls, dawn mist and springtime drizzle, then go ahead. You a big boy/girl, now. I mean, you know, you go to the bathroom all alone. So break the rules. Go for it. Reach too far, fall off a couple of precipices. It is the only way you’ll find out who you are as a writer. (Note: if you absolutely, must make some money out of writing, can’t afford the luxury of falling off precipices discovering your literary persona, try advertising or public relations. They treat you nice, the offices are usually warm and clean, and the discipline of making every single word work in a limited space will fine-tune your writing skills. Above all, thank your lucky stars you are not French. They have the Académie Française breathing down their baguettes 24/7 advising them that it is not what you say that matters, but where you put the accents. 10- Take notes. TAKE NOTES. Always have paper with you, at all times. Get it all down- any dumb thought, any crazy action of a third party, the nuance of a drunken conversation, the color of a stormy sky (the hell with Elmore!) the crazy meanderings of a fissure in the sidewalk, so on. Anything. This is your fountain of youth. I used to be a painter- still am, half-truth be told- and painters learn in their diapers to sketch, sketch, sketch. So sketch verbally. With a library of notes, you’ll never be at a loss for words. Ask John Lennon. 11- Wing it. Just write. Get it down. The great stuff, the rubbish, the nonesense, the yuk. It is the act of writing that is important. You can clean it up later- sometimes the right word doeasn’t arrive the first time around, but three day’s later, out it pops. Worst comes to the worst, you can always save it somewhere. DO NOT TRASH IT. Fantastic thing is, in this era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, you can stash trash away in a doc. somewhere out back where you can always recuperate it. Crap today, genius ten years from now. You a writer. Anything is possible, except writer’s block. David Lovattsmith is a writer of advanced senility enjoying an unfashionably happy marriage with two unfashionably extraordinary saplings in a city where everyone speaks French except when they speak English and where everyone fears the winter except that it is really quite terrific. Unfortunately for the literary world, David Lovattsmith has never experienced writer’s block and will, as a result, publish early 2008 his first collection of short stories entitled ‘Hasta Nunca.’ Excerpts of this chef d’