The Blank Page

The blank page. Every writer’s nightmare, or if not a nightmare, the fear that bugs us most of the time. What shall I write about? If only I could write a novel. But it is not given to me to write novels, or anything at all at the moment, though I have stories to tell.

Whatever it is that occludes my thinking right now, the blank page represents an awesome reality. Awesome is  a word that is used far too lightly nowadays. To be in awe of something is to reverence it, to be subject to it. A writer is always subject to the blank page. They are subject to the work. They owe it.

The blank page isn’t just about not being able to write anything right now. For the writer, being faced with the blank page represents a kind of death, not some elevated intellectual state trying to give shape to itself with words, but more what it must feel like to lose physical speech after a stroke or accident and be unable to articulate thought, unable to convey need.  

The blank page must ultimately convey something to the reader. It must resonate in some way with their need. What is written must be to the reader what Joyce described as an ‘epiphany’. It must reveal a sudden understanding of truth, not a specifically empirical or exclusively moral truth, but something the reader has always known but never realised they knew until the moment of reading. Writers enable us to discover for the first time something that is intimately familiar. God perhaps. They may or may not intend doing this.

The blank page, which is too often conflated with writer’s block, makes for an end of the road feeling. You will tell yourself that things will open up when you feel less tired, have a coffee – or something stronger, smoke a cigarette – or something stronger. Or perhaps you should just stop and take up crochet instead.  But the blank page admonishes you. It does not give you permission to shut the computer down or close the notebook. From the moment you first put finger to keyboard, or pencil to paper way back in your school days, when your English teacher thought you showed promise, you were committed. The commitment was not a decision on your part. It was made by someone else, voiced through someone else (your English teacher, perhaps) or else through accruing experiences that cohered into plots of one kind or another, or ideas that needed to be given shape so that they could connect with people and give shape to their own ideas, or a meaning of some kind to their life.

None of this is guaranteed to fill the blank page, of course. Thoughts do not flow in a mystical way onto a screen or notebook. They are honed, often out of nothing, or out of the mere whisper of a thought. But it is not the thought that counts right now. It is the blank page which exists for itself. It has its own life. It makes demands. Perhaps, in this sense, it has a certain religious side to it. But treating any creative process as a religious exercise of some kind is dangerous. It invites self delusion, for one thing, and grandiosity, which is death to writing and to any genuinely creative work. So you could say that it is best to keep self completely out of the picture, whatever the picture is, because we are not talking about self expression. We are talking about the kind of creativity which only comes to fruition through self discipline.

In art, as in life, self discipline is not a very exciting exercise, so it has to be learned early. I learned the need for it from the nuns at school whose parting words of advice to sixth form leavers were to get up in the morning at whatever time you’d resolved you would get up, no matter how late or early. It seemed inconsequential at the time, as a life resolution, but it has been invaluable to me as a writer. Sit in front of the blank screen or page regardless of what it gives, or doesn’t give, at any one time, but do it at the same time every day. Do the same thing with prayer, along with anything else you might resolve to do on any given day.