Oh, the dreaded blank page. That all-important first page. The one an agent you queried might not get past if it’s not amazing. The one that might cause an editor to consider sending that pass email. The one that your client might hate. The pressure to get that page right can paralyze us. How do we begin? Where should the story start? How should it start? Your hands hover over the keyboard, grip the pen. But the words don’t come. Usually we describe this as “writer’s block,” but I don’t love that term. It feels insurmountable. Instead, frame it as a common writing issue that is eminently solvable: finding the way in. It’s all swimming in your head but resisting expression and organization in written form. How do you get over the blank page hurdle?
The blank page is my constant companion. One of my strengths as a writer is that I’m prolific and have strong throughput. My job demands that I write a lot of pieces with both creativity and speed. So, I see that blank page of starting a new piece often. Sometimes five times in one day. And I can’t wait around for the blank page fairy to appear and make the words miraculously start flowing. I gotta summon them. Here are the techniques I use when the muse is being stubborn. Here’s how I defeat writer’s block, find the way in, and fill that blank page.
1 — Write out of order. You know that plotter vs. pantser dichotomy? I’m chaos. I often start with whatever part I do feel ready to write. And I jump around. At some point, the very act of writing starts to bring the piece together, the way in reveals itself, and I write the beginning long after I wrote the middle and end. I did that on this blog post. I started with one of the tips, jumped to Anne Rice the end, finished the rest of the tips, then wrote the beginning.
2 — Read (or watch). Put the blank page away and read or watch something about whatever it is you are trying to write. Read a nature or architecture or history piece about the setting your work will have. Dive deep into a niche-y detail. Watch a video about the daily job of what a character does. Read a related nonfiction piece. The purpose of this is to get your mind into the space where it’s actively exploring what’s going to fertilize your writing. Immerse yourself in what you are drawing from to create something new. Get in the frame of mind to write about it by reading around it.
3 — Drive. Or shower. Is this TMI? Am I the only one who gets my best ideas when I’m in the shower or driving? It’s inconvenient because these are not the best places to have to write something down (DO NOT WRITE AND DRIVE. If you write and shower, that’s your own business.). Invariably, I have found that any activity that my brain-body connection knows how to do without me actively thinking about it frees my mind to wander around and solve the problem of finding the way into whatever I’m writing. What relaxes your death grip on your thoughts? Go do that and let your mind lazily work on the writing problem.
4 — Write something terrible and just keep going. Don’t worry about where it starts, just start it anywhere. You’ll fix it later. Don’t take my word for it. Take Anne Rice’s. She was my website client for many years (and she was everything you think she was and so much more). On her son Christopher’s podcast with Eric Shaw Quinn, she said something that stuck with me about writer’s block and her writing process.
“The courage to just keep going. I think what happens with me is I write four or five sentences and then say, ‘Oh, no, no, no, they can’t begin like that,’ and throw it away. Then I write another four or five sentences, and then I write four or five pages and throw that away. Finally, you just have to stick with it. You have to tell yourself, stop being a perfectionist. Stop editing and re-editing what you just did. Let it start rolling for you. You can go back later and re-read the beginning. Stop just running to the laboratory and washing your hands, trying to get them clean, trying to get everything perfect. Just calm down and keep going. And I’ve had that problem all my writing life. My office used to be littered with unfinished first pages of the book I was working on as I would tear them out of the typewriter and throw them on the floor…And that can destroy you if you can’t make yourself relax and just go forward.”
— Anne Rice
Folks, Anne Rice also thought her beginnings were crap. She kept writing anyway and I think we can agree that she fixed those beginnings later. We can do it, too. RELAX AND JUST GO FORWARD.