It does sound like initiation would be the place to start. Sometimes it helps to provide a starter sentence initially, until he gets more comfortable with generating his own starters. Or he can try starting from the middle of the written product and working forward and backward from there. (I write many of my evaluations beginning from the third section, and wrote most of my school essays starting from the first body paragraph, not the introduction.)

...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...