Conquering the Page

Nothing is worse for a writer than a blank page.  Rejection comes in at a close second, but a blank page is more terrorizing…more frightening.  It sits there in front of you, tormenting you like some sort of wizard’s experiment gone wrong until you either give up or get on with it.

Right now I’m battling that blank page in more ways than I care to think about on a daily basis.  I’m literally fighting that blank page in my writing.  I’m trying to take my own advice and write just to write every day no matter what.  One day, my ship of good ideas will come.  But it’s hard putting the proverbial pen to paper when you just don’t feel like holding the pen.

It’s even harder when the paper laughs at you.

Some days I can get something out.  Some days I can even get something out of value.  And other days, when I’m lucky and in the zone, I can get something out that’s on point.  I live for those days.

People ask me when I started writing and why.  And to tell you the truth, I can’t really remember.  But the first consistent writing I did was in a diary I got at the age of 7.  There in between the black and white striped covers, I was able to put down the innermost thoughts I had at the time.  Some of them seem trite to me now.  Some of them still hurt with the sting that originally stung me.  And some make me laugh.

In my next novel (* she says not having published her first novel *), I’m going back to one of those times.  It wasn’t a time captured in the folds of that first diary, but subsequent journals and ingrained in my mind in a way that time cannot erase.  It was one of those times I had to write but couldn’t quite tell the story the way I can now.  Perspective is a real bitch to get, but it’s also a helpful bitch to have.

I’m still staring down the blank page, laughing at me in its infinitely frightening way.  But I’ve stared down this page before, and I’ve won.  The trick is to capture my mind in the right moment…in the right creative frame of thought.

You don’t scare me, blank page.  I’ve conquered you before.  And it’s even more important to me now. The fact that we’re mortal enemies will not detour me.  You’re a ship waiting to be boarded, a freight train ready to be hijacked.  And I’ll be the one holding the bounty after I’ve tamed you once again.

I write because I have to.  I write to conquer the blank page.  I write to tame the past.  And I write to turn the future around.

What do you have to conquer?