When I interviewed dozens of successful writers for a book, I discovered that many of them experience anxiety or fear related to writing. Some of those feelings may be a result of needing to satisfy so many "requirements" at once. (That’s even true for bloggers.) You want to create work that pleases yourself as well as your editor and future readers, but how can you ever know if you’re choosing the right words out of all the hundreds of thousands available?

Happily, some writers have figured out ways to make use of self-imposed constraints to write better and, paradoxically, with more ease and less self-torture.

Consider the following strategies.

How to Set Your Own Limits to Allay Writing Anxiety

The constraints of writing alphabet-themed mysteries (“N” is for Noose and so on) concentrate her creativity in a (mostly) positive way, novelist Sue Grafton told me. She compares writing mysteries to a hand of bridge, where you’re always dealt 13 cards, and within those cards you have no idea what you’re going to do or where you’re going to go. “And so the skill,” she said, “is to take the rules and regulations and push them as far as you........

© Psychology Today