It doesn’t frighten me. I like looking at it. All naked, pure and brimming with possibility. A flat field covered in snow, untrammeled. A white void, unlike the black version whose magic is threatening and malevolent. You’re invited to disfigure the nothingness with words, which in the age of electronic pages, you can easily wipe clean again. You can have a conversation, first with yourself, then with a possible reader, if the words start sounding like something you’d want to share.
There is nothing about a blank page you need to dread. It will accept anything you wish to contribute. There are an infinite number of blank pages waiting for you to trundle across, clumsily or with easy grace. They don’t care. Like your devoted Labrador, a blank page will forgive your every transgression and never love you the less.
Nothing feels more perfect than the communion between two beings. You and the blank page are one-on-one, a fundamental relationship that produces a third thing, nourishing the world. And like all successful unions, the more you put into it, the better it gets. The richness is limitless, the possibilities beyond counting.
The blank page is the ultimate renewable
resource. Consume all you wish. There will always be another blank page, and
another after that.
Assuming the continuation of the species, the product is eternal. It will outlive you and other material things. It will be reborn with every new edition, or preserved as an artifact for future observers to unearth.
All it asks of you is to join in the process, to convert its blankness into something real. To shape the whiteness into a new form, unique unto itself, that allows the void to exist as a tangible thing and not just a potential.
When the blank page is no longer blank, it becomes something else. Its purity has been compromised, never to be perfect again. It can never be perfect because no two readers will ever agree on what is written there. Including the writer, who likely has the least ability to judge the result. Even a sonnet that wins the Pulitzer Prize will whisper possible revisions, hint at blemishes, betray compromises. Though what should be celebrated is the almost-perfect. Or perfect in its own way. Perfect for me, if not for thee.
The more the fleshed-out pages, the greater the possibility for imperfection. Irritating for the writer, though often endearing to the reader, who may savor the nicks, scuffs and scars as evidence of the work’s unique allure, its true claim to originality. As with any object prone to the capriciousness of time, the planned purpose, that first proof of brilliance, may dim, while the less intended, the rough shavings that litter the words, sentences and paragraphs, begin to glow.
You don’t know, the writer, the maker of footprints across the drifts of snow. You probably never will. But this is no reason not to make the attempt, over and over again, as long as the hands, or voice, or blinking eyes have the ability to convey. It’s why the act of writing is always justified, the blank page an everlasting invitation.
What’s not to love?
Mayhap one way to deal with a blank page is not to face it at all. Instead, put the feet up and daydream until the story gels and settles in the mind. By the time you reach for the empty page, it's already filling with words from the mental cache of the daydreamed story. Perhaps.
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