Journal Entry #4: The Blank Page

Date: Friday, November 02, 2007
Time: 21:36

I have read this and heard this from different professional writers and authors and now you get to hear it from me. The hardest part of writing is that blank page.

The blank page doesn’t care who you are, or who your mother is, or was. It doesn’t care what kind of a day you’ve had; it doesn’t even care if you’re depressed that it’s raining out. All it cares about is sitting there and mocking you. The blank page will sit there and mock you and taunt you and draw a line in the dirt, double-dog dare you to write something on it. And it will do that until you screw up your courage and put a letter or a word or a sentence on that page.

But the blank page isn’t finished with you yet. It looks at what you’ve written and it scoffs at you. “You wrote that?” it says sneeringly. “I could do better than that and I’m only a piece of paper.” it says before you can answer. So you grab it out of the typewriter and crumple it into a ball, all the while you hear it laughing at you.

And then you look at the wad of paper, and you see the power you have over it, and see nothing of the power you thought it had over you.

And then you begin to write.