From high school students to professional writers, many fear the blank page.
Even anyone who needs to write a letter—whether of condolence or congratulation—often finds the blank page to be an Intimidation with a capital I.
“What should I say?” is the perennial concern.
Painters have a similar difficulty when confronting a blank canvas, but at least they have a view or vision that they wish to copy or record.
When Tchaikovsky was commissioned to write his first ballet, he also faced a blank page. He had never written a ballet before and didn’t know the rhythms that a ballet requires. So, he very sensibly took the score of a successful ballet and used it as a model for Swan Lake, keeping the overall structure, but supplying new melodic content.
Luckily for the perplexed writer of letters, there is a toolbox of familiar expressions. These can be found on preprinted greeting cards. Generic—but useful. They prove that we feel mostly the same about most of the most important things. There’s a comforting commonality in this, and even proof that “human nature” persists through millennia.
One simple solution for writer’s block is to start writing. Write whatever—doodle with words. And more often than not, something interesting or useful will develop.
Anthony Trollope claimed never to have had writer’s block. His solution? He pretended that he was riding a horse toward a jump and needed to urge the horse of his sentences forward as fast as possible to avoid catastrophe. Revision was forwarded to the next day.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.
