Start a new and bigger notebook. Go bigger. If you’ve been working in an A5 notebook, go for A4 or even A3. An A3 notebook is huge for a writer but we can handle it. Think like an artist. Writing is art. Nobody benefits from us going smaller. Take up space, even when you’re writing take up space. And seeing as we’re going big with a notebook, why not increase the size of your writing implement. Write with a marker pen, or one of those extra thick marker pens. Shift from an HB pencil to a 8B pencil. Or to charcoal. Enjoy writing big, words that are visible from a distance. Be visible.

If you’re frustrated with your writing, if you’re bored or blocked or not sure where to go next, don’t blame yourself, blame the page. It’s not you, it’s it. Maybe you need a bigger page and a bolder writing instrument. Just because writing is related to pen and paper doesn’t mean they have to be the regular sizes. Be irregular. Write on A0 paper with a calligraphy brush. I speak from experience, I freed myself from the confines of the normal notebook and a ballpoint pen – I’m free!!! – and it took me to places I’d never have believed I could be in. I’ve always thought that writing was an art form and have always approached it as an art form, but I never thought that being an artist-artist was a place I could occupy.

I write to you from the artist place. But it’s not just about size. It’s not just about bigger notebooks, bigger pages, bigger pens and pencils. It’s about options and possibilities and not being wedded to one way of doing something. An experiment can be a way of accessing something. Swimming in a pool and swimming in the sea are both swimming. Sitting in the bath and sitting in the shallow waves at the beach are both sitting in water. Not sure the metaphor works, but it feels nice in this twenty minutes of writing. Your page is water. Make it more like the sea and see what happens. Your ink is the waves. Or something like that.