Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Only when I am on a tight deadline to write an op-ed for a newspaper, never when I work on a long book. As Pascal wrote, “If I had more time, I’d make it shorter.”

What’s your advice to new writers? Learn a bit of linguistics. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers by showing drafts to people who are like your readers. Write many drafts, separated by a long enough interval so that your writing will seem strange to yourself. Savor passages of writing you like and try to reverse-engineer them, figuring out how the writer made the passage so good. And after 2014, buy and read The Sense of Style: A Manual for the 21st Century.