You’re staring at a page which
glares back out you, it’s unmarked and dazzling white almost shining in
the glow of your lamplight. It’s perfect, unmarred by any fault or flaw,
and you can’t bring yourself to put pen to paper
of finger to keyboard. Words march boldly from your mind and down your
synapses but fall, defeated at the beachfront between your hand and the
page before you. You rush out a few phrases, a creative charge of
Cossack riders into the no-man’s land upon the
page – you try to ignore the first misspelling but the second one
stumbles you and it’s not long before the brief sally into narration is
covered by a bombardment of scribbles and hatchings to hide its failure
from the world.
Now the page is ruined; a storm of
ink is proof you tried and died, as have so many others. You’re just one
of them, a hopeless hack – untalented and destined to pen something so
formulaic it may as well be a text book.
In a fit of rage and shame you tear the paper, once so pristine, and
cast it towards the bin. Then you storm of to do something more
productive or hide under a blanket and cry your insecurities away.
This is a heavily dramatized
example of what I call “Blank Page Syndrome”; the clinical inability to
write anything down upon a blank page. Fear of poor quality, worries
concerning longevity of story and suddenly having
any idea of what you wanted to write about leave your brain via
parachute are all causes of this. It affects fiction writers as well as
non-fiction ones, and I think stems from an odd yet instinctive fear of
making a permanent record of an idea of opinion.
This is an odd fear to be instinctive, but I cannot think of any other
reason that anyone who wants to write something worries about whether or
not it will be good enough.
Who cares? No one may ever read it!
And if they did, who’s to say what their opinion will be? Even if your
writing
is terrible – and odds are it won’t be if you spend even a little
thought on it – then what are they going to do? Laugh? Tell you never
to write anything again? Admittedly these are fairly hard hitting and
painful responses. However, if your ‘friends’
react like this rather than with some kind of measured and constructive
criticism they probably aren’t your friends. You can usually turn
round, however, and ask them what have they ever written or read to make
them an expert. As a tip, ‘Harry Potter’, ‘Twilight’
and ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ are not answers that elevate a member of the
public to the height of professional literary critic.
I think for a large number of
people the problem is they have not written before and so don’t know how
to start. What is the correct etiquette? Is there one? How do stories
start? To reassure any budding-but-panicked authors,
there is no one hundred percent ‘right’ or ‘correct’ way to start a
story, and as long as you begin then you’ll find it continues on. Yes,
the quality may improve as you go and, yes, you may go back and hate how
you started the piece but as mentioned before
you can always change it. So start writing.
Now, non-fiction writers might have
a bone to pick here, especially as far as essays, dissertations and
presentations go – “But my work is meant to be professional and will be
scrutinized heavily!” Yes, you’re correct. However,
putting some effort into writing something relevant has always been
better than simply not writing anything at all. You do have to be in it
to win it, and not writing anything basically guarantees failure. As
mentioned, you can always redraft and edit you
work so get something on the page so you have something to work with
later.
More experienced writers might
argue they know how to start things and don’t want to have to compromise
their writing quality by rushing into something. This is admirable but
largely irrelevant; until you actually write
something your talent and skill are both utterly wasted. Other
experienced writers might point out they never have this problem, and
never did. If that’s the case, great news for you! Why are you reading a
blog entry titled ‘Blank Page Syndrome’?
Once, a lifetime (seven years) of
mistakes ago I was staying, alone, for a week with an ex-girlfriend who
had cheated on me, subsequently ending our relationship. This was
entirely because I could not afford to buy flights
to hurry myself to where I needed to be for university and was an
utterly unenjoyable experience. She was interested in playwriting, and I
had always been to author. Inevitably, because writing doesn’t require
you to talk to anyone else, we ended up writing
and, because human’s are emotion and social animals to the point of
self-destruction, we did it at the same table. I was dissatisfied but
wrote as if I wanted to be absorbed into what I was writing while she
could not begin. Stared at her page, occasionally
glancing at me or at my writing filling my own page, and could not find
a way to begin.
Eventually she sighed and said, I
fear in a misguided effort to compliment me or raise my spirits, “I
don’t know how you do it. I always struggle to start but you can
just…write!” My response, given in a fairly anti-social
tone which might have come out part-snarl and part-disdain (definitely
related to the piece I was writing. I’m a very method-writer and the
character just happened to be a very bitter one.), “I just write. I’m
sure you’ve done it before.”
While the sentiment may have been a
little harsh perhaps, the message was honest – start. Write. Create. If
you don’t, you’ll never get anywhere. And this is what happened to me
when I wanted to restart this blog, hence
this post. It might reiterate a few points from previous ones but
hopefully puts it all together succinctly so I can link this page in
future rather than repeating myself again. I hope it’s helpful – if not,
write me back!
