“The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”
–Alan Dean Foster
This principle of writing will sound obvious, but many principles do, once expressed.
Writing often begins with research. A relaxed period marked by supine stints of reading. Research is sometimes followed by the misery known as writing. Now here’s the aforementioned obviousness: bring research to a close, completely, before you start writing. Don’t research and write at the same time.
Research is a process of collecting thoughts. It’s not always so formal; you are always collecting. Everything you read passes through the filters of your identity and commingles with the bromine of your bias (and You most definitely have a bias) to become your thoughts. (You are what you read.)
But You are not your thoughts and your thoughts are not “you.” Most of your thoughts are other people’s ideas: borrowed facsimiles, furtively installed, or outright theft.
Most of these thoughts are limp and worthless because You can't be good at everything, and Knowledge is not the same as information. But given enough time in the marinade, some of the critters in your brain wriggle to life. You decide to snare a few in a net and wrap them in paper. (You might even Stack your sentences to test their mettle.)
But take heed.
You must put down the shovel before you pick up the pen. Declare research closed before opening the floor to prose. Just as you cannot inhale and exhale at the same time (unless you are one of those folks playing the digeridoo), you must not research and write at the same time.
Because every piece of writing, is merely that. A piece. In your quest for completion, you may languish in the parlour of input instead of the workshop of output. But consider that every book you’ve picked up was written by someone forced to put their books down, to start writing.
So stop reading. And start writing.