Type one ugly sentence before you’ve had time to get scared. Now it’s not blank anymore; now it’s just a draft.

A blank page and a bad page are two completely different problems, and the second one is much easier. Facing nothing, you have to invent and evaluate at the same time. Facing something poor, you only have to improve it, and improving is a task your mind is comfortable with.

Write the worst possible opening quickly, before any judgement arrives. Keep it deliberately clumsy if that helps, and treat its only job as moving you out of the blank state and into revision.