The Blank Page?

Fear of a Blank Page

In the New Yorker magazine, once I'd come across a hilarious cartoon of Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, sitting at a writing desk with a mass of crumpled sheets of paper on the floor around him.  Each of those sheets had sentences that just weren't working out. "Call me Jim" "Call me John"  "Call me Alexander"  etc.  How long did it take Melville to get to that remarkable first sentence?  "Call me Ishmael." From that first line, the novel has us in its grasp.  

Beginnings are sometimes difficult. Often a writer might not know where to begin a story.  You simply begin moving your pen or moving your fingers on the keys. Maybe you begin with a description of a person, a place or a thing.  It might be terrible writing. Actually it is hard to tell if it is terrible or just all right or even if it's good when the writer becomes afraid it was all a mistake. It's difficult to endure that feeling.  It's easy to crumple up that page with those early words and toss it in the trash. Start over.  Start over again. And again.  

The best advice I had ever received was this:  "When you are telling the story to your friends, listen to how you begin.  Start writing there."  This helps. Start with oral storytelling. A writer might start a story way too early on paper, long before the actual events in the story. In other words, start with action.  Start with a phrase that catches the listeners' attention.  

The other piece of advice is: keep writing. Keep writing even if the writing is not that great. You might have to get something down on paper before you realize where the story is heading.  In other words, the beginning words might simply be priming the pump. It's only after you get flowing will you have good writing.  Then you can go back and cut the preliminary work.  

Another piece of sage advice:  It's much easier to revise than to write.  So don't worry about your poor writing, faltering plot, inconsistencies, shifts in verb tense, etc. etc.  Once you have the bulk of the work done, then you can go back and fix it.   

This is well illustrated by this excerpt from the short story, "Bushes," China Miéville writes:

He took out a notebook and charcoal to make marks and every time he had to strive against the blankness of a page. He would be still and tell himself that he had already ruined the book so that was that, now, and it being too late to save it, he could continue.

Now that's a good thought.  The blank page is pristine as new fallen snow. It is an inviting possibility of perfection.  Reassure yourself that anything you put on that page is like you stumbling and dragging your feet, wandering about wildly and crookedly, and falling down face first. I like this approach.  Miéville assures us with the thought that any mark made on that page will not be perfect.  It's too late. You are now not perfect, and you are excused. It's no big deal. Right?  It was never going to be perfect anyway.  Just carry on. Accept the facts. Keep going.  Maybe the story won't be perfect, but it might be good.  

Maybe it's best to start working on scratch paper, on the back of envelopes, on grocery lists, or scribbled recipe cards, or on the back of your children's drawings. 

Does that help? I'm curious about what helps you. Feel free to comment.  

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For more information about this speculative writer who Ursula LeGuin called "brilliant," check out the author interview published in the Boston Review
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/literature-culture-china-mieville-strategy-ruination/