Purity and perfection are entangled together like lovers who can’t let go.
A romantic metaphor right?
When you sit down to tackle that blank page.
You look at it and you know it’s perfect the way it is right now.
It’s kinda like a yard after a night full of snow.
It’s blanketed in white. Untouched, unmarred, mounded soft hillocks and slow swept waves pillowy nothing.
It’s a deep inhale and a slow exhale.
It’s perfect because you didn’t touch it. You left it alone and it remains, tabula rasa aka…
An untouched void.
Cause if you were to go out there onto that yard, what do you think would happen?
You’d get footprints all over it. You’d kick up those soft hills, those rounded curves. You’d dredge up a little mud, maybe some leaves left over from autumn or whatever.
Sure, you’d make a snowman, and he’s cool and all, but the area all around him is a scooped up sloppy nightmare. (Ugh I hate the dirty slush bullshit we get here in the UK)
And well it happened cause you needed to heave the snow to make the man in the first place.
You might even bump into an evergreen branch and all the wonderful snow that had already elegantly sculpted itself upon the branch would CHOOF and fall down.
But then the waggle of the branch would move other branches too, and all that snow would come down in awkward plops and chonks, and you’d scare away that astonishingly beautiful Summer Tanager that was perched there, except where I am in England. You’ll probably just hear cats going insane.
The page is like this, too.
The moment you touch the blank page, you mess it all up. It’s mucky with words, tacky with sentences. Some words might be misspelled. The grammar? Far from tip top, if we’re being honest.
Was that opening line worth it? Are there too many commas? Not enough? Did you need that exclamation point? It was wonderful before you got here…
It scares me. It literally scares me, staring at the blank page, the page before anything has been written. Not a title, not a chapter header, not a first line. I get that tightness of going up a roller coaster, as you tick tick tick up toward the top, before the fall, before the screams and the wind and the oh-my-god-I’m-gonna-die-today-but-it’s-all-good-I’ll-end-up-in-the-papers-innit…
Maybe you feel that, too.
Writing is scary. It’s okay. Do it anyway.
Mess up the yard. Leave footprints. Jump off the cliff. Track mud through the house of your own expectations. Build wonky snowmen with stick arms and crooked smiles. Let the Summer Tanager fly away. He’ll find another branch, and you’ll have a story about the day you scared away beauty in service of making more beauty.
We over think a lot of shit and the blank page is the biggest killer of our own creativity.
The blank page applies to everything else creative too.
Just get messy. It’s a lot more fun that way in the end…
Stephen Walker.