Confronting the Blank Page

Are you ready to turn a fresh new page, or load a blank document on your laptop? The beginning of the writing process has the most inertia—that sluggish dread that makes you feel like you’re about to climb Mt. Everest. But don’t worry; literally every writer feels this. It’s completely normal. It is not a reflection on your writing ability or the quality of your ideas. Think of it as a gravitational pull to pass through as you fly into a higher orbit. Break through it, and your writing will feel more fluid and weightless.

How? One time-tested way is to start writing something. Anything. Try a writing exercise or a writing prompt, just for fun. It might only generate a few sentences, but it’s already broken through your inertia.

The key is to suspend your critical voice, which is probably poised and ready to eviscerate any ideas that spill onto your page. One of the most effective ways to deal with your perfectionistic, critical voice is to acknowledge it and set it aside. Its basic function is benign—to help you excel and hopefully not embarrass yourself in the process. But that’s also where it’s causing you harm. The entire creative process is about building something in a messy and authentic way. You will write and rewrite. You will change plotlines. You will add a dimension and nuance to a character that you never expected. An improbable note of redemption may change the whole tone of your story. Your words will likely take on a life of their own.

Here’s the key takeaway: to start writing, you need to stop editing. Those are two very different functions. The editing comes later. Don’t let it stop you at the outset, before you ever get into the flow of writing and creating. Your job right now is to build. Build something interesting and unusual. Give your ideas room to breathe. Then, when you go back and edit, you can refine and reveal your creation.

Writing and editing go hand in hand. Just make sure you use them in the right order, and don’t allow one to dominate the other.