FA+
Shop
The Blank Page
8 years ago
General
As a burgeoning creative writer in college, I was exposed to a variety of writing techniques designed to spur my creative mind into action. I kept a memo recorder on me so that I could write all the time—in the car, out for walks, in between classes. I "ran the baton" with other writers, each of us writing a paragraph at a time and discovering what we could add to a story. I learned about shower brainstorming: as it turns out, water running over your skin stimulates the nerves and kicks your brain into high gear.
Amidst all of these techniques, none were so effective as the simple practice of free writing, where you just let words flow onto a page. Specifically, the most powerful tool in my arsenal as a writer was simply learning to put something onto a page. A word, a sentence, anything. Put something there and leave it there. Let words flow from a single idea, even if that idea is terrible. I'm doing it right now; "the blank page" was a thought that came into my head and I put it into this word processor as soon as I could.
The blank page is the most significant part of the creative process by far simply because it defeats so many ideas with its mere existence. The blank page is a void, a vast nothingness that is a greater threat to any work than any other hurdle I have experienced in my adult life. Words, lines, notes—whatever your creative tool—disappear in the nothingness that is the blank page; insignificant, small, a speck in a sea of expression yet expressed.
Over the years I've wondered how it can be so hard to overcome the blank page, and it is only recently that I've come to realize the true nature of that glaring emptiness.
Consider the colors of black and white; consider a canvas painted entirely black, and one left untouched, fully white. On first reflection they both appear empty despite one being completely covered in color; they are both a blank slate, empty. Except that they are not.
The black canvas is covered with paint, which consists of pigment that absorbs light so that only certain colors of light reflect back towards you, creating the colors that you know and love. Blue pigment absorbs all colors but blue; green pigment absorbs all colors but green. Black pigment, however, absorbs all the colors, reflecting back nothing (or realistically, very very little). If you mix together every paint in your set, you will get black. It is every pigment.
The unpainted canvas, then, is surely empty, because it has no pigment upon it—and yet, it isn't empty either. Light, you see, is comprised of many wavelengths of color traveling together, and white light is every color traveling side by side. In fact, you can see this demonstrated in the classic grade school science experiment of shining a beam of light through a prism and marveling at the rainbow of colors that emerge out the other side.
The black canvas, a matte of every pigment; the white, a reflection of every color. Both seem empty, and yet both are quite full.
The blank page is not daunting because it is nothing; it is daunting because it is everything. Every idea that could ever be waits unrealized on a blank page. Every masterpiece that has ever been created and ever will be created starts here, on the blank page. Overcoming the blank page is a matter of reaching into infinity and plucking out a single strand of meaning from its depths.
There are fields of creative passion that I feel are lucky beyond words because they need never face down the blank page. Photography, for example; the art of photography lay in framing reality in a way that captures and conveys meaning to the viewer. The skill of a talented and dedicated photographer cannot be overstated, but at the same time, reality never presents the photographer with a truly blank canvas; the world is always there and it is what it is. The world is never nothing, and the camera cannot show something where there was nothing, because there was never nothing.
The infinite possibilities of the blank page may be more easily visualized by its cousin, the block of stone. A common, almost tongue-in-cheek sculpting adage is "to sculpt an elephant, simply carve away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." Of course, this oversimplification of the incredible skill that is sculpture has its roots in the truth: within that block is the potential for an infinite variety of sculptures, and it is the artist's task to remove all but one of them from the block, leaving only the work they sought to create.
The block of stone—the blank page—these are the impossible hurdles that instill in me a deep respect for all artists.
Amidst all of these techniques, none were so effective as the simple practice of free writing, where you just let words flow onto a page. Specifically, the most powerful tool in my arsenal as a writer was simply learning to put something onto a page. A word, a sentence, anything. Put something there and leave it there. Let words flow from a single idea, even if that idea is terrible. I'm doing it right now; "the blank page" was a thought that came into my head and I put it into this word processor as soon as I could.
The blank page is the most significant part of the creative process by far simply because it defeats so many ideas with its mere existence. The blank page is a void, a vast nothingness that is a greater threat to any work than any other hurdle I have experienced in my adult life. Words, lines, notes—whatever your creative tool—disappear in the nothingness that is the blank page; insignificant, small, a speck in a sea of expression yet expressed.
Over the years I've wondered how it can be so hard to overcome the blank page, and it is only recently that I've come to realize the true nature of that glaring emptiness.
Consider the colors of black and white; consider a canvas painted entirely black, and one left untouched, fully white. On first reflection they both appear empty despite one being completely covered in color; they are both a blank slate, empty. Except that they are not.
The black canvas is covered with paint, which consists of pigment that absorbs light so that only certain colors of light reflect back towards you, creating the colors that you know and love. Blue pigment absorbs all colors but blue; green pigment absorbs all colors but green. Black pigment, however, absorbs all the colors, reflecting back nothing (or realistically, very very little). If you mix together every paint in your set, you will get black. It is every pigment.
The unpainted canvas, then, is surely empty, because it has no pigment upon it—and yet, it isn't empty either. Light, you see, is comprised of many wavelengths of color traveling together, and white light is every color traveling side by side. In fact, you can see this demonstrated in the classic grade school science experiment of shining a beam of light through a prism and marveling at the rainbow of colors that emerge out the other side.
The black canvas, a matte of every pigment; the white, a reflection of every color. Both seem empty, and yet both are quite full.
The blank page is not daunting because it is nothing; it is daunting because it is everything. Every idea that could ever be waits unrealized on a blank page. Every masterpiece that has ever been created and ever will be created starts here, on the blank page. Overcoming the blank page is a matter of reaching into infinity and plucking out a single strand of meaning from its depths.
There are fields of creative passion that I feel are lucky beyond words because they need never face down the blank page. Photography, for example; the art of photography lay in framing reality in a way that captures and conveys meaning to the viewer. The skill of a talented and dedicated photographer cannot be overstated, but at the same time, reality never presents the photographer with a truly blank canvas; the world is always there and it is what it is. The world is never nothing, and the camera cannot show something where there was nothing, because there was never nothing.
The infinite possibilities of the blank page may be more easily visualized by its cousin, the block of stone. A common, almost tongue-in-cheek sculpting adage is "to sculpt an elephant, simply carve away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." Of course, this oversimplification of the incredible skill that is sculpture has its roots in the truth: within that block is the potential for an infinite variety of sculptures, and it is the artist's task to remove all but one of them from the block, leaving only the work they sought to create.
The block of stone—the blank page—these are the impossible hurdles that instill in me a deep respect for all artists.
