Why You Should Not Be Afraid of a Blank Page
Do you ever stare at a page asking yourself, “what the hell am I going to write?”
I often had this problem for the longest time as a student. I looked at the blank page, and the pulsing cursor in front of me and nothing seemed right. I suddenly knew nothing.
Only in the last couple of years have I learnt that I know a lot and that page is never genuinely blank.
I had plenty of time to have good and bad ideas
Anything I ever thought about can go on that page.
My writer self can pick any of my old thoughts that are relevant to the task at hand and throw them on that empty page. It is not the role of my writer self to decide what should not go on that page: that’s editing. Editing is a whole different job.
I’ve now learnt that we rarely write anything from scratch.
My belief that a blank page is wrong
All I need is to have my past thoughts at hand, filter the relevant ones and throw them on the page.
Most people struggle for much more mundane reasons, and one is the myth of the blank page itself. They struggle because they believe, as they are made to believe, that writing starts with a blank page. — Sönke Ahrens
Being able to gather selections of my older work on a page is now a superpower.
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