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I fear writing; a result of my perfectionism. The prospect of defective prose frightens me, so I don't try. A thought I put to paper last month:

"I am imprisoned within my lack of clarity and lack of style. Fucking failure. Chained to a quiet and passive existence.

I want to express; I want to free my ideas; I want to communicate my message; but I fucking can’t. I can’t clear this painful fog."

I just decided to write a lot. Even if it doesn't make sense (http://blog.uncool.in/2009/03/26/episode-1-perspective-shift...). I suppose after a month or so of writing crap, I'll be able to loosen up my rusty writing skills a bit and my writing will become more natural.

You might want to try that.

I agree. Commit to writing 3 pages a day, even if it is just repetitive nonsense and ramblings. Feel free to burn the notebook at the end of the month. After a few months of this, you just may find you have loosened things up a bit in terms of the old "the best is the enemy of the good" problem.
I'm often faced with the following choice: write a paper about Algorithm 1.0, or try to figure out Algorithm 1.1? Or perhaps tweak the code to make it cleaner/faster/more general?

Writing the paper usually loses.

This is why deadlines can be good things.
Write paper 1.0. Then work on 1.1. Then, instead of having one paper, you have two, and are that much closer to tenure. :)
In theory, that is the optimal procedure. But writing code is so much more interesting right now.

It's my most productive form of procrastination.

Rudolf Flesch recommended

http://www.amazon.com/Write-Speak-Think-More-Effectively/dp/...

choosing someone whom you'd like to write to and who would write back (a parent or a grandparent, perhaps?) and then writing that person a letter with lots of description of what you're thinking about and doing once a week. After a year of that, you'll write a lot better.