"As a philosophy blogger I often provide writing advice to students. One of the things I like to tell them is that the two biggest enemies of writing, the two worst causes of writer's block, are nothingness and infinity. Nothingness refers to the blank paper or computer screen with which we begin; infinity is the self-imposed pressure to say something of limitless scope and significance. My way of addressing these two closely linked threats is to focus on all the constraints on a project that lie beyond my control: the rules I absolutely must follow without having chosen them, and which are obviously neither nothing nor infinite. Simply by identifying all the operative constraints on a given project, one's room for free decision is narrowed and focused to a manageable range, and the specters of nothingness and infinity soon dissipate in the rising sun."

Graham Harman. The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011).