Writer's Block

I suffered from chronic writer's block for over twenty years. I desperately wanted to write and I had ideas but I never could seem to get beyond a page and a half of writing. I still have old notebooks and scribblings from years ago. I succeeded in overcoming this block last year by entering a competition in a Writing Magazine and the impetus to start and keep going was the deadline. That is how I broke the block. I also picked a genre that I had never read before and was unfamiliar with. I had to produce a Novella between 15,000 and 30,000 words long. The guidelines for the competition asked for a theme based on Sherlock Holmes Detective Stories. I had never read those before and so I started to read and take the books apart to see how they had been constructed. After that I planned the book starting with the ending and working back to the beginning. I then sat down and wrote 15,000 words in just over two weeks which surprised me. It was the most I had ever written in my life. I didn't win the competition but it broke the block. After that I went on to write my first children's novel of over 100,000 words and I also wrote and illustrated another children's book of about 6,000 words. So after years of procrastination and blocks I produced three books in twelve months, which surprised me again.  Blocks can be broken and procrastination overcome. The desire to write may just be incubating.