The Curse of the Blank Page is a Conflict Between Love and Hate

We’ve all been there, held under the cursed spell of the blank page. It stares at you and you can feel its bright eyes glaring into your very soul! It pulls you in and tears you apart at the very same time. You sit there immobilised by fear unable to form words on the page.

Blank page syndrome is a plague of the prolific and newbie writer alike. It can jump out at any moment striking down the best authors whilst stopping the worst. Yes, there are many habits and tricks of getting round it, but just for a moment, I want to embrace the blank screen.

To break the spell of the blank screen, we must explore what it really is and how it makes us feel, so that we can understand it and embrace it. We can conquer it without having to fight against it.

You see, the curse of the blank screen is a conflict between love and hate.

We love the blank page

We love it because it signals opportunity. It signals the start of something new, like a new idea, a new thought process, a new project; we love starting new things and experiencing the adrenaline of something as yet undiscovered.

We love it because it is filled with promise. There’s no precedent, no prior work, no requirement of conformation with something that went before.

We love it because we can create who or what we want to be. We could be a fiction writer, we could be a detective, we could be a researcher on the verge of a new discovery or we could create a revolution. Such is the power of a blank page.

We love it because it’s an open space with air to breathe. It’s not claustrophobic there. We can move around. Our fingers can dance. Our brains can explore and run around. We can be kids in a sweet shop if we want to be.

We love it because it’s unpredictable. We don’t know where it will go. The journey is unwritten. It’s an empty plate ready to be filled with a feast, or a famine. Or like much of the best crockery, it sits at the back of the cupboard for a while, until it is ready to emerge on a special occasion.

We love it, because it sits in a time warp. It’s able to bend through space and time. It both threatens as a deadline looms, rearing up its ugly head and sits calmly, waiting for a new space-time adventure to begin.

We love it, because it is both an art and art waiting to be created. Do you know how much manufacturing history it took to create that pen and notebook in front of you? Or the blank screen? There’s so many mediums to explore. But they are all perfectly ready for you to add your masterpiece on top when you are.

We love the blank page because it doesn’t judge. We could write anything. We could write nothing. It could be good. It could be bad. The blank page holds no grudge against you.

But we also hate it.

We hate the blank page

We hate that we haven’t started yet. I mean it’s not that hard to put some words, any words, together about the thing we need to write. But you’re no help in providing a jump start when our battery is low.

We hate that you haven’t prepared us better. We’ve read everything we need to read and researched everything we need to research, why isn’t that on the screen? Or we’ve read nothing; you’re no help in getting us started.

We also hate that you’re unpredictable. Writing needs to be organised, thorough and structured. We need support; headings, formatting and grammar of which there are none.

We hate that it’s not finished yet. What is its use if an unfinished story? The characters are lost. The words have no power on your page.

We hate that you’re selfish. You demand all our attention and keep us in solitude. We have to sit here right now to write, when all we want to do is something else. You are taking all our focus, when our mental and physical self want to wonder and stretch. We want to breathe, enjoy and experience life, not be alone.

We hate that you’re not showing us the way. Sometimes a little guidance is a good thing, like when learning to walk or ride a bike. Having someone hold our hands helps us learn and keep learning.

We love you and hate you in equal measure. We’re under the spell of the blank page.

How do we break it?

So what happens when we love something so passionately but hate it in equal measure? We become indecisive. And that is when we freeze.

My unsolicited advice to break the curse?

Embrace the love but respect the hate. Run blindly into the arms of a blank page, whilst taking a firm grasp of it at the same time.

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Use the love to create your story and use the hate to do it better; this time, next time and beyond.

And just start writing; anything.

• An opportunity; start
• A promise; prepare to keep it
• Be unpredictable
• Create someone or something; finish it
• Get lost in time and space; but don’t be selfish
• Build on a masterpiece; show others the way

Before you know it, the words will come and the spell of the blank page will be broken. I started with a blank page and just look at the journey it has taken us on.