Curse and Comfort: Confronting the Blank Page

We’ve all been there. I was there before writing this. Where’s there? 

Poised over a crisp, white page; a blizzard of possibilities swirling in the imagination. What should I write? Where do I start? Will it be, as my personal standards dictate, a work of genius? Ha. I’m no genius. No literary great. I’m a fraud. I’m having a Fraudian slip. See, a terrible pun. I give up. 

Wait, what if I can write? What if the next words I scatter into the serene whiteness are the finest in my oeuvre? Oh no. A French word in an English sentence. I’m a pretentious hipster. I’m done—if I don’t bother, I can’t fail. 

(The cycle of self-doubt). 

Paradox of blank

The blank page is a comfort and curse. Jekyll and Hyde. 

First, it invites limitless possibilities. It’s a space where if the stars align, our future changes. After all, word one in every cherished novel was written on a blank page.  

In essence—the blank page is an imagination lottery. The thought of thoughts that could validate us and secure our prosperity, is intoxicating. Will tomorrow’s words be the ones? This gives us comfort. We can exist in a blissful state of “one day I’ll write my bestseller” or “award-winning snippet of copy”. 

It’s a cosy, if unproductive, place to be. The reality is it’s the fear of not writing on a deity-like level which petrifies our productivity. Steals our creativity. If a page remains blank, we’re spared the embarrassment of failing to walk on water. 

Yet, if we don’t express ourselves failure is guaranteed. We can’t be creative without creating and can’t succeed without trying. These emotional paradoxes are the curse of the blank page. 

Fear fuels us

The fear of failure is necessary in writing. All creatives experience it. Because we care about what we do. It’s the electric pulse that sparks bold thinking and doing. Our fear of producing poor work forces us to go for broke. It’s also within this emotional sensitivity that we achieve depth and a connection with others. 

The problem is crippling self-doubt. When the fear of failure paralyses and blank page becomes blank life. Struggling in a distant mire of supposed rejections and grandiose futures, far from the present. 

Why do we even write?

As copywriters we crave to be the next David Ogilvy and as writers the next Ernest Hemingway (the Hemingway app has that covered now). We hold fast to our diamanté dreams so tightly, that nothing else will do. Society is ripe with rags to riches, abject failure to success stories, stoking these cravings. 

Take Stephen King. Master of the macabre. He was living in a mobile home, barely scraping by as a teacher when he wrote Carrie—which catapulted him to literary stardom and financial plumpness. As the story goes, his wife fished the opening chapters from a waste-paper basket and implored him to complete it. 

We all want a bin novel that ends as our salvation. That liberating feeling of being at our lowest creative point, thinking our writing is worthless, only to be proven spectacularly wrong. 

But…big but. We know the chances of this happening are slim. Why then do we write?

The desire for acclaim may galvanise our efforts or stop us trying in case we don’t match up, but it’s not why we write. 

Behind our meta self-narratives, we know why. It’s in our DNA. It’s hardwired. At some point in our existence, we discovered that the urge to articulate through words was a must. Perhaps when scrawling edgy nonsense in our school textbooks. 

Whatever the case. It was subconscious, uncontrollable, and we loved it.   

Conquering the Blank Page

This blog may have dramatised the blank page a smidge. Moments of imposter syndrome and writer’s block are part of the creative process. Doesn’t mean we should be anxious of a fresh document. 

There are ways to loosen up the mind and conquer the blank page. 

For starters, forcefully ejecting future critiques grounds us in the present. Our internal dialogues sometimes air on the negative side, overlooking the fact our writing might be…genius. There’s always a chance. Move over negativity. 

Another way is to write anything. No plan. No expectations. Just write. This is the equivalent of jamming in music. It’s said free writing taps into the subconscious and leaves no room for self-doubt. Somewhere in the word soup there will be a flash point, and bang, inspiration and flow return.

Finally, if nothing will rouse us from our creative slumber, it’s time to get outside. Walk in the streets, fields, and woods. Follow the path of a bee as it nips between flowers. Watch crows spiralling like black ash over a graveyard (so writer). It doesn’t matter. What matters is immersing ourselves in the world away from our desks. 

This rescues us from internal chaos and unites us with tangible happenings. It clears the mind of scrabble pieces, making way for ideas. And who knows, lightning could strike, figuratively.