Counting on the Trust of a Blank Page
Neil Gaiman’s still working on Odd, and I’m still working on the John Assaraf book. We got a fifteen-day reprieve (now ten days and counting) from the publisher (the same folks who published The Secret, which augurs well) — so now I’m in a mad dash to November 1. Today, finished Chapter 16. Tomorrow, I’ll do 15. Monday, 14. (See the pattern?) Eventually I’ll meet myself in the middle, and it will be done.
Writers often talk about the terror of the blank page. Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The American President, West Wing) put it this way:
I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, “You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I’m not your agent and I’m not your mommy, I’m a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?”
The late great Jeff MacNeilly, cartoonist-author of “Shoe,” said:
Writing is easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank piece of paper until beads of blood start to form on your forehead.
Ernest Hemingway, when asked what was the most frightening thing he ever encountered, replied:
A blank sheet of paper.
I see it a little differently. When I look at a blank sheet of paper (or its present-day equivalent, a blank Word document), it looks not like a terrifying mountain peak daring me to scale it, but like a trusting child, holding out its hand to me and counting on me — with that utter and unerringly unselfconscious faith that only a child can have — to take it and lead it to where we are supposed to go.
In the face of such total trust, who am I to doubt? So, I take its hand, and off we go.
October 21st, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Next new invention (they probably have one) but it’s the Writer’s Block. Kind of like the old round black magic crystal ball where one answer always came up in a watery solution whenever you asked it a question. Answers like: yes, no, probably, maybe, perhaps. Remember?
This would be similiar: a black square block that had one rule: Whenever you picked it up, you would have to start your first/next sentence with the word that came up in the block. Great Christmas present to all your writer friends.