Ode to a blank page
Send out the proclamations, unfurl the banners, awaken the elders. Let the children sing from street corners whilst adults gather and cheer.
The Critic Has Been Silenced.
He sits, sulking and muttering, outside my writing space with a Ploughman’s sandwich, a flask of milky tea and the first stories I ever wrote, the ones written when I thought - no, knew - that writing was easy. He’ll enjoy that and I’ll have a chance to get some work done in peace.
Finally.
There it is. That precious blank page. Unsullied and pure. Fresh and unmarked with nonsense. It would be a shame, wouldn’t it, to spoil that angelic white sheet?
The cat’s asleep on the armchair, curled like a croissant in a golden shaft of sunlight. How content he looks, his head tucked under a brown paw, snoozing feline snoozes and dreaming cat dreams. His whiskers, so thin and delicate, move gently in time to his tiny snores. I stare and I digress and I procrastinate.
Back to the page.
That giant expanse of possibilities. So many possibilities. Too many possibilities. An overwhelming amount of possibilities.
Across the street a van pulls up, its engine idling as two men in reflective yellow bibs climb out and go to the back of the van where they remove chainsaws and ropes and big red helmets with full-face visors.
How interesting.
Tree surgeons, assassins, overly aggressive beekeepers? I peer at them but they duck out sight below the fence line and I lose sight of them. For a brief moment, I think of following them, seeing what they are up to. I could claim it’s research, but now the phone’s ringing and it’s the height of rudeness to leave a phone unanswered. No, I haven’t been in an accident, my fault or otherwise, but wait, please, no, don’t go.
Finally, all those pesky distractions have quit and I can get back to my desk with a nice warming cup of tea and I can finally sit down and… Write?
Well, why not? It’s about time. A sentence forms and I delete it. Another begins before that too is dragged back across the page. The force is strong and it compels me to take the dog into the garden for a wee, and whilst I'm there I might as well prune the bushes. A couple of leaves are browning. Deadhead them to give the other new buds a chance. But I can’t find my secateurs and my computer is sat on the table, looking out the window, wondering what it has done to be abandoned so often. Come on, dog in, bum meet seat, fingers meet keyboard and …
The fear of that blank page is overwhelming. Once the work gets going and the first few pages are in the universe and existing happily it becomes less stressful and worrying because then, after a while we can leave it for the day, safe in the uneasy knowledge that we know what we want/need/can/should write the next day/session/frenzied fit of typing.
But the starting.
Those first words we have to pluck from somewhere and Lay Them Down. That’s where we realise we need to clean our laces. The bible has already stolen the perfect opening. In the beginning.
So what on earth can we do to just get going.
First, we write a sentence. Then we pummel that backspace button until it’s so dazed and bloodied and confused that it surrenders and waves the flag. The white flag. Which goes nicely with our white page.
Surely there’s a better way.
And there is. All I need is two keyboards.
One would be for my first drafts and it would have everything I need, all 26 letters, all ten numbers, the little dots and dashes that allow readers to take a breath between incoherent, rambling sentences. Even the semi-colon, not for use, but because I don’t want to make any of my punctuation feel as though it’s not as useful or hard-working as the others. What this keyboard would not have, however, would be the Backspace or the Delete keys. It is these two little keys that are the Critic’s secret weapon. The Inner Critic is whispering through the door asking to come in, saying how he’s changed, he’ll be better this time, just trust him. But I’ve heard it all before, a thousand times.
What he should be doing is picking sandwich crumbs from his jumper and slopping tea over himself whilst laughing at my early dialogue tags, exclaiming and expostulating and roaring aloud. The Inner Critic uses these two simple keys as tools of destruction, wielding them like sword and sickle.
And so this keyboard wouldn't have them.
They belong to my second keyboard. His keyboard. The Critic’s keyboard. But they would be small keys, fiddly keys. Keys that are difficult to push so I’m forced to account with my trigger happiness.
The reason for these two keyboards? Because eventually, if I continue to put word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after, well, you get the idea, something good will come.
It may be one lonely sentence.
Or an image that captures the emotion and mood just right.
Or a piece of dialogue that rings as true as Waterford crystal.
And it’s likely that these nuggets of talent would lie at the bottom of page one, or halfway through page two and I would have never got there if I had only used my second keyboard. My Critic’s keyboard.
Yes, the blank page is scary. Yes, starting out is hard. Yes, the Critic is there, lying in wait with Backspace and Delete, his terrible, gigantic, howling beasts. Let him come, but just not yet.
Stephen King tells us that ‘To write is human, to edit is divine.’
Divinity is for gods and critics.
Let’s revel in being human.