This is number 132 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THE MOST TERRIFYING THING in the world is facing an empty page. At least if you’re an author. You can do all the planning, plotting, putting in snacks and caffeinated beverages, talking up what you are going to write, but ultimately, you have to sit down and face the empty page.
The problem of the tabula rasa, or clean slate, has been around since at least Aristotle’s time. It’s philosophical meaning is that the human mind is born blank and all thoughts originate after birth, based on experience. In some religious philosophies, our purpose is to erase the slate of our minds in order to reach a state of oneness with the universe.
Please don’t argue with me about either of those points. I’m not religious and I’m not a philosopher. If I have time to stare at my navel and contemplate the mysteries of the universe, I’m using it to stare at an empty page and try to figure out the words to put on it. That’s the only tabula rasa I’m concerned with.
As a writer, and author of some 75 fiction titles, I am intimately familiar with the concept of facing an empty page. It’s hard. When preparing for November Noveling Month, I plan out much of what I intend to put in my new novel. But at midnight on Halloween, I sit in front of the computer thinking about the daunting task of writing 50,000 words in the coming month, I listen to the sudden quiet that comes over the group of people I’ve chosen to launch the month with, and I stare at a blank page trying to figure out how to begin. (BTW, I'm currently over 48,000 words or fourteen chapters into my current NoNoMo project after 15 days.)
This became such a problem a few years ago that I began a new process during my prep month that would help me when we counted down to midnight. I memorized my opening line. I did it without writing it down. I would come up with a launch point and then silently repeat it over and over until I had it memorized. Then I would repeat it every day until it was time to start writing.
“Indiana wasn’t heaven, but she lived next door.”
“I was slow to learn to talk.”
“Hi! I’m Bob and I’ll be your demon tonight.”
“Cornfields. Wheat fields. Bean fields. Hay fields. And fields of crops I couldn’t identify. Miles and miles of fields.”
“High school was a bust as far as I was concerned.”
“Art Something. That’s me. Art. People point at me and say, “That’s Art Something.” Nobody knows my last name, I guess. Nobody cares. But Art is the important part. Art is my name. Art is my life.”
I memorized those lines until I had each down so it flowed smoothly. Then on Halloween night at the stroke of midnight, I just dumped that line out onto the page and kept going.
It’s referred to as ‘breaking the page.’
Writing is not the only profession or avocation in which the creator faces a blank page. Artists often have a similar response to a blank canvas. In fact, a favored technique for breaking the page is to do a number of quick sketches before turning to the actual canvas or drawing paper. These warmup sketches can be done on cheap paper stock, like newsprint, and are usually very large, allowing the artist to really limber up.
I did my graduate work in theatrical design. One of the aspects that is less fun than just ‘being creative’ is the necessity of creating technical drawings. Talk about a big sheet of blank paper! Taping a $5.00 sheet of vellum to your drafting table and setting a T-square on it is intimidating. We were taught to first draw a border on the paper and to create the info box in the lower righthand corner. Having done that, we no longer had a blank sheet of vellum. The page had been broken and we could continue to draft the plans for the scenery or a prop.
Do you recall your schooling days? Some of us are either too far removed or simply didn’t pay enough attention to remember much of them. I was always amused by the teacher’s instructions at the beginning of a test. “Write your name at the top of the page!” Like she had to remind people to identify their work! And perhaps she did, because there was always one paper ‘left to be claimed’ because there was no name on it. But the simple act of writing your name at the top of the page broke the white space. It was then yours.
All of these techniques can be applied to the tabula rasa before you start writing. I understand that many people—especially younger people—do not handwrite anything. They may not be able to get started on their book by writing notes. Printing doesn’t flow with the mind as smoothly as cursive writing, and that is an art that is all but lost. The important thing is to find a way to detach yourself from assuming your first draft has to be your final, finished, and printable draft.
Now that we are writing, what happens when you reach a point in your manuscript where the words just don’t come out anymore? Next week, we’ll talk about ‘The Logjam.’