Sometimes I have a thousand ideas running through my brian and I can’t get them all out.
Sometimes I look at a blank page and my mind goes to mush. My mind isn’t blank, it’s not that I’m not thinking, rather what I am thinking involves being distracted by unimportant things. Writing a daily blog puts me in a dance between these two states. Sometimes I’m driving in my car and I think of 2 or 3 things to write about in less than 5 minutes. I will create draft titles and put a sentence starter or two on the page before I hit save. (No, I don’t do this while I’m still driving.)
Other times I can sit with a blank page and have no idea what to write? I go through my drafts and don’t really want to expand on any of them. I check the news, and search some of my social media feeds, and suddenly I’m no longer writing. This is when the discipline of just starting to write is important. This post was called ‘Wrapping’ and while it might sound interesting to some, the first few lines told me that I wasn’t going to unwrap the idea. So I deleted the title and once again faced the blank page.
In ‘The War of Art‘, Steven Pressfield said, “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” I have the audio version of this book and I have listened to it twice. The fact is, that although the blank page can be intimidating, it doesn’t hold any more power over you than you give it. It can be an unapproachable mountain, it can be a desert plain, it can be a white-out blizzard, or it can just be a blank page, waiting for you to add some ink, (or digital ink).
This page is no longer blank. From the second sentence, this has been easy to write. It has taken me less time than most of my posts usually do. The words have flowed, the quote I was looking for above came up very quickly in a Google search, and so even that wasn’t a distraction. I just had to get past the blank page.
What are the blank pages that hold you back? And what can you do to get them started?
