A Lifelong War Waged on the Blank Page

I've long heard writers and artists in general talk about fear, writing with fear, writing over fear, managing fear, using fear, breaking under fear, and numerous other derivations of fear. Or reviews calling a piece of literature "daring" and "fearless". And while I understood, in theory, what they were trying to convey by that I don't think I fully understood the real, deep seeded implications of that and what is implied by those statements. It seems easy enough to sit down and write, to compose a piece of work out of words, perhaps the very tool, artistic device, and means of expression we as a people are most familiar with. After all, we are the social animal, using words every day on a regular basis. We think with them, we write with them, we speak with them. But it isn't that simple. And yet, to contradict myself, at the same it is that simple. 

Now the easy thing for me to do here would be to pull up every quotation from every writer's interview I've ever read and say, "see, even the best deal with this", but I'd rather elaborate on it myself. It's better that way, to acknowledge it on our own. Seriously. Go ahead and Google "writers' quotes on writing" or something along those lines, and what you'll come up with is a bevy of proven, renowned, and award winning writers all addressing the same thing. Hell, Ralph Keyes even wrote a book about it, The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear. 

It's the fear of beginning. Fear of imperfection. Fear of drying up. Fear that what's produced won't meet expectations (Whose expectations? It doesn't matter. Usually my own.) Fear that I'm not in the right mood. Of not being able to write. That what I write will be shit today, that I'm wasting mine and everyone else's time. That these words aren't good enough, that I should wait until they are. For young artists, there's this maligning fear that they aren't artists or that they haven't earned the title of writer, painter, or filmmaker. Well, no one hands those out. There's no DMV of artistry where they hand out artistic licenses designating us writers or sculptors or photographers. No one's ever going to and - more importantly - no one needs to give us permission to be artists. That's a decision we must make with ourselves. We're writers the moment we say we are and hold ourselves to those responsibilities. We're painters the moment we say we are.

Unfortunately, the fears don't end there. The fear of self-discovery, self-revelation, because being so close to ourselves and delving in so deep can be an uncomfortable experience. When it's you, a screen, and an empty room, you're more or less thrust upon yourself and forced to deal with whatever comes of it. There's no telling what we'll find in these dark, mostly unchartered depths where we may discover things about ourselves we'd rather not know. There's the fear of being criticized, of being open and exposed and entirely vulnerable. In truth, it doesn't have much to do with an actual doubt of one's own talent and abilities. That, I'm confident in. A lot of the time it's a indiscernible, almost unnameable and surely irrational fear, directed at and afraid of something masked and cryptic, but no less forceful. The sickest one of all is the fear of beginning, because it's based on this fear that I won't be able to begin, that I'll fail in the process, be derailed and never accomplish what I set out to in a given day, so it seems so easy to simply put it off and delay until later. And by breaking under the weight of that fear, by putting it off, it's practically ensuring that the fear comes true. The fear of an inability to write is the inability to write. If I don't begin because I'm anxious about beginning, I'll never begin. Most of these fears are superfluous. They're all extensions of what I see as the same common denominator. 

The blank page. And with that blank page comes the daily fear of beginning. Every morning, afternoon, evening, or whenever, an endless siege of white space waits without words, without stories, without characters; in a word, without life. And it's up to me, only me, to fill that space with all of the above and more. You'd think the previous days' work would make it easier, that I could look back at however many thousands of words there are, however many pages written, but it doesn't. Months and months of getting down 1,000 words a day doesn't amount to shit when I sit down to the frosty blank page, coaxing me to wait until tomorrow, wait until the right moment when "inspiration" erupts out of me and every orifice of my body like billions of tiny volcanic muses, and it's so easy to give in and say, okay, I'll wait, there's always tomorrow. Which is true; there is always tomorrow. But that's a copout. And so is the muse. All myth and abeyance. I can keep saying there's always tomorrow every day for the rest of my life and at the end all that I'm left with is one long empty scroll with the words, "There Was Always Tomorrow." 

I imagine this is a similar dilemma for all artists. The painter and the blank canvas; the sculptor and the solid stone block, unblemished and perfectly shaped; the musician and the empty staves or the quiet room of echoes; even the graffiti artist and the clean facade. All of these involve the formation of something whole and full of life from a wholly formless impetus that seems as if it's pulled straight from thin air, most often done in utter solitude. Where does this impetus come from, where do the ideas come from and how can I construe them in such a way to make sense? It involves gripping ahold of these nebulous thoughts, imaginations and ideas, which are mostly abstractions, calming the chaotic activity therein, and applying it to very tangible mediums - i.e. the writer's first words, the musician's first notes, the painter's initial brushstrokes, the sculptor's first series of chisels. It's a constant battle and argument with the self, one in which no amount of preparation can equal what those first few moments of groundbreaking action can do. It's starting, having the audacity to begin and then begin again, again, and again. Once inside the work those fears, anxieties, doubts, and all those worries seem to burn off. They leave the foreground. What I've done is maneuvered around them in such a way that they momentarily have no stronghold on me. The writing comes out naturally, which isn't to say it's not difficult, but it's not arduous. There's no block, no filter, and no obstacle anymore, somewhere between the conscious and the subconscious where the words and the life poured onto the page seem at once both a product of my own doing and something entirely apart of me, a magical combination of these very fears, maybe. At that point, it's writing, and like Hemingway said, you just sit down and bleed. 

What about this fear, then? What the hell is it? Is it all bad? What exactly is there to be afraid of? It sounds outlandish enough, admitting that those precious first moments before the first few paragraphs are in place are rife with instability and apprehension. It's not like I'm entering a burning building. My life isn't on the line. So why the fear? The analogy I've heard in the past, and it's an apt one, says that actors get stage fright while writers get page fright. Cute, right? But in all seriousness, fear precedes excitement, or it's at least tied in there with it. They both do similar things and share a much sought-after chord of resonance within us. It mustn't always be a negative emotion. Fear can be good. First of all, it's a clear signal that whatever you're doing triggers emotionally for you. Beyond that, it provokes inquiry, drives curiosity, feeds some strange primordial aspect of the creative impulse. Fear means we're excited, albeit in an agitated way, and it's of the utmost necessity to be excited about our work. If an artist isn't excited about their own work, how can they expect anyone else to be? It energizes, creates alertness, keeps us observant, ready to pull and borrow and adapt on the fly. If I'm willing to challenge it, this anxiety can be a propeller. As an artist I'm constantly exploring, digging, prodding, probing into much of what might be uncomfortable, and so fear is a constant bedmate. Oftentimes a writer is writing about their very fears, things they could never do, see, talk about, expose themselves to in real life. Fear can serve as this force of purgation, a way of digging everything outside of me and putting it all out there in a setting and context I would never do anywhere else besides on the safety of a page, and I don't mean that in any remote autobiographical sense, but rather the sense that I'm absorbing myself in ideas, themes, concepts, characters, and stories that aren't mine in any way other than that they swirl helter-skelter inside me, clamoring to get out, the natural product of having simply lived a life, paid attention, and soaked everything in. Getting away from fear is an impossibility and I would argue even if it were possible, it would be harmful and a hindrance to the craft. There's an opposing side to the white page. It isn't just fear. Quiet as can be, hope and excitement share the same space with that white page's intimidation. Because it's blank I can fill it, give it depth and breadth. I can keep pouring more life and colors and verve into it until it's practically got its own heart thumping from the page. 

The only thing to do is keep going. It's getting there that poses the problem. And I don't think, because I'm hardly a superstitious person, that there's any right setting for it. The right coffee or the right tea, the right breakfast, the right music before or during, the right time of day. I doubt any one of these matters when you get right down to it, other than establishing a psychological niche that one thinks they need. Because if I'm not setting myself to the task of throwing as many words as I can at this blank page, sitting down, and doing it, none of that matters. It's all fluff. 

So what I've got to do is take that fear and bury it. Or rather, tear it open and get inside of it, make it mine, turn it into something useful, use all of those emotions, each one twined and coiled around the other into this enormous legion of feeling, thought, and passion, to steamroll the writing, to fuel the words. But the only way to do that is to take that first step day in day out, to perch myself at the foot of this blank page, deal with its void, and fill it word by singular word. Every day I have to face this fear. I have to. In order for anything to be written, I've got dive into this massive ocean of self-doubt, trepidation, and uncertainty and plow forward, because I've got to get these words down that can't come out fast enough and I don't have the precious commodity of time - no one does - to wait for that perfect bout of inspiration where the process clicks.

And now to do what I emphasized I would not: a shameless list of quotations. Not that any of these help in any way whatsoever when we ourselves are in the thick of it or add any comfort-among-others reassurance. If anything it's at least interesting to note how successful writers and artists face this challenge throughout their career, notwithstanding all successes. 

Jack London: "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

Joseph Heller: "Every writer I know has trouble writing."

Cynthia Ozick: "I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence."

E.L. Doctorow: "Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake."

Carlos Fuentes: "Writing is a struggle against silence."

Carrie Latet: "If I'm trying to sleep, the ideas won't stop. If I'm trying to write, there appears a barren nothingness."

Steven King: "The scariest moment is just before you start. After that things can only get better."

Anais Nin: "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

George Orwell: "Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

Doctorow, again: "Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and you learn as ago. And planning to write, outlining, research, talking to others about writing is not writing. Writing is writing." (So yes, I am aware, none of what I've written is writing.)