Over the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about writer’s block, procrastination, and how the two relate.

There’s one bit of advice that works very well for overcoming both these obstacles as well as just being helpful generally. It is, in fact, as the title proclaims, the second best writing advice I’ve ever gotten.

(Don’t you hate it when people quote statistics or whatever and say something like ‘stroke is the second-biggest killer of Australian women’ and don’t mention what the first is? It really bugs me.)

The advice is this: leave yourself something for the next day.

Let’s say you’re on a roll and the words are flooding out smoothly and your characters are dead-on and you know exactly what’s going to happen next and it’s all just wonderful…so you keep right on writing till it’s all out, and you sit down the next day and, well, you said it all yesterday and now you can’t recapture that flow and you’re stymied and want to quit and go eat a tub of rocky-road ice-cream.

If you stop just before the point where you’d be finished, even just a paragraph, you are leaving yourself a way back into the story. When you sit down the next day, you can read the last few lines, think, ‘oh, yes, that’s right, and now…’ and hook yourself straight back in.

I personally have repeatedly found it useful as a way to start writing as soon as I sit down instead of faffing about collecting my thoughts (or procrastinating, if you want to be rude about it).

It’s not a replacement for the discipline of hitting a consistent word limit, but it can smooth mountains back to molehills.

(Oh, all right: the first is heart disease.)

(What? Ohhhh! It’s write every day.)