I’ve been writing for a long time. I started when I was a child (I have a bunch of very terrible novels that I wrote as a kid and a teenager that should never see the light of day), I went on to study creative writing at Uni, and I’ve gone on to write short stories, comic anthologies, articles, blog posts and even workshops. And yet even after all this work and all these words, I still find facing the blank page scary.
It’s terrifying for even the most seasoned writers—writers who have written and published many books, writers who have multiple awards gracing their bookshelves, and writers who actually turn up and do this every day because they need to make a living.
I’m sure you know this too. When you sit down to write that article/essay/assignment/newsletter or whatever it is, suddenly everything else becomes so much more interesting. Instead of working on the actual writing, you find yourself tidying your desk, doing laundry, clearing out the spare room or doing things you’ve already put off for six months. Or you fall down the social media wormhole and find yourself mindlessly scrolling through Facebook or Twitter. Anything else instantly becomes more attractive than facing that blank page.
Unfortunately that means that the blank page wins, and the blank page winning means that you still have that thing you need to do hanging over you—making you feel bad and making you feel guilty for doing all those other things. You may have put off the task for another day (classic procrastination!), but then the war begins anew. The important thing is not to let the blank page win, and the only way to beat the blank page is to fill it.
So here are nine strategies you can use to beat—and fill—the blank page. Now, you won’t necessarily be filling it with gold; unfortunately it’s a rare occurrence that good writing just flows from the tip of your pen (or
your typing fingers) like milk and honey. But you will fill it with something, and something—no matter how crappy or half-formed—is better than nothing, because something, at least, gives you something to work with.
1. Morning pages
In The Artists Way (which I have not read all the way through), Julia Cameron advocates starting your writing session with “morning pages”: fill three pieces of paper longhand (not digitally) and write anything you like—nonsense, drivel, a stream of consciousness. The idea is to empty your brain of all the things you’re currently thinking about or stressing over so that you can clear them out of the way and focus on the work you have to do. They’re also a way of bypassing your inner critic—that voice that tells you that what you’re doing doesn’t matter and will never amount to anything, that you’re a waste of space, that you’re wasting your time. Fill three pages and then stop. Don’t show them to anyone. They’re just for you. Then move onto the thing you’re supposed to be working on.
2. Brain dump
A brain dump is similar to morning pages because what you’re doing is just downloading everything you think about a topic and vomiting it onto the page. I like using this technique for articles as it’s a good way of getting it all out there, even if you don’t use it all later. It could be a stream of consciousness. It could be loose associations. It could be a mind map. Whatever it is, it’s the raw materials with which you craft and refine your writing later.
3. Set a timer
Often people moan about having no time to write. They long for whole days—weeks—months—they can dedicate and spend on a particular project. The truth is, endless amounts of time can actually be unhelpful to creative work. Instead, if you put fences around your time, you can actually be a lot more productive. One way to create an artificial fence is to set a timer—say 30 minutes. Sit and write until the timer goes off. Once those 30 minutes are up, stop and do something else. Continue if you want to (and especially if you’re on a roll). But don’t feel like you have to. You’ve done your time. You’ve put in the work. If it’s just not happening, try again later.
Timers are a very good way of making the war between you and blank page less painful: do your 30 minutes (or whatever it is) and then stop. You’re only “in prison” for that short amount of time, and then you get “released”.
Timers are also great for productivity because enforcing regular breaks actually makes you produce more. Tony Schwartz, CEO of the Energy Project, often talks about the human body’s ultradian rhythms—those 90-minute cycles where we move from being high and energy in motivation to fatigue and sluggishness. Align your timers to your ultradian cycle and you’re likely to write more and make better use of your time.
4. Use your incidental time
Instead of setting a timer and imposing an artificial fence on your time, make use of your existing fences. Existing fences are determined by external factors—the time you spend waiting at the bus stop, the length of your trip on public transport, even the duration of your lunch break. Even if you only have 10 minutes, you can still get quite a bit done. Use that time to brainstorm or scribble. A little can go a long way.
5. Show up at the same time every day
Showing up at the same time every day is nearly impossible for me because none of my days are the same. But it may work for those of you who thrive on routine. It’s a way of tricking your brain into creative mode because you’re training it in the habit. Show up at the same time every day and make yourself write for the same amount of time. Just as with exercise, the people who do it says that it gets easier the more you do it.
6. Make rules to trick yourself into it
Another technique in the “trick your brain” vein is to make rules for yourself to force yourself into it. Neil Gaiman (one of my favourite writers) has a rule that when he’s sitting at his desk, he can either look out the window or he can write. He can’t read. He can’t check the internet or read social media. He can’t tidy or clean. He can stare out the window or he can write. Soon enough, staring out the window becomes boring, so he turns to writing instead.
7. Use placeholders
This is a trick I learned at GenreCon last year: in order to keep yourself writing, write things like “Insert cool thing here” or “Look up that reference later” or “{Character name}”. For me, it’s easy to get distracted by things that detract from the writing—for example, naming new characters or chasing down that obscure reference or quote I read years ago, but can’t find because Google Brain doesn’t exist yet (though perhaps that should never happen). It’s better to leave those things for later and keep going.
8. Aim to meet a specific word count
This doesn’t work for me, but it might for you. At GenreCon last year, I met a romance writer who had said on this panel I attended that she knows that she can write the first draft of a novel (i.e. 80,000 words) in eight weeks. (She also has a two-year-old and a job in copywriting. I am in awe of her.) This is how she does it: she works out how many writing days she’s likely to have in eight weeks, and realistically, it’s Monday to Friday as writing doesn’t normally happen on the weekends. So five days a week for eight weeks is 40 days, and 40 days into 80,000 words is 2,000 words a day, which seems quite doable when you think about it. So she aims for 2,000 words a day. Sometimes she does more, sometimes she does less. She keeps a spreadsheet to track her progress, and at the end of those eight weeks, she’ll have that first draft. It might be a crappy first draft, but it’s still a first draft.
9. Leave things half-finished at the end of your writing session
Final strategy: at the end of your writing session, leave things half-finished. This goes completely against my nature because I’m a completionist and I can’t stand leaving things half-finished. But it’s actually a helpful trick to get you back into what you’re working on at your next writing session. It’s called the Zeigarnik effect, which is named after Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian psychologist who studied memory in the 1920s. She found that incomplete tasks are easier to remember than successful ones, because your brain keeps it active in your working memory in the background until you get back to it.
So there’s nine strategies to use to win the war against the blank page. The important thing is to write something. Produce that crappy first draft, because once you have it, you can do something with it—even if you throw it out and start over. Nothing is ever wasted; you’re always building on what you’ve done before.
That said, expect that first draft to be crappy. Expect it not to work. Expect it to be hard. The crappiness of that first draft is no reflection on you. As organisational psychologist Adam Grant says, “Instead of saying, ‘I’m crap,’ you say, ‘The first few drafts are always crap, and I’m just not there yet.’”
Happy writing!
