Page Fright

I have no idea what to write about today, so I am reading Ralph Keys’ The Courage to Write to try and get around it. I think he might have read my mind about some things. Like Page Fright: “a fear of confronting the blank page” (25). I TOTALLY HAVE THAT. If I have more than a second to think about it, I will do almost anything to avoid a blank page – or a blank screen, as I most often write on my laptop.

Page fright has led me to do all sorts of crazy things, like:

• Watch an entire season of Arrested Development start to finish without stopping.
• Clean out my closets.
• Bang my head into a wall.
• Exercise.
• Cut my hair.
• Spend an unplanned $50 in the automotive section at WalMart because I just realized I have to clean out my car RIGHT NOW.
• Attempt a handstand.
• Read a book about fear of writing.

I read eagerly on in the hopes that he is going to tell me there is a magic cure to defeat this terror. There is, it seems, only one.

Write something.

Well, that’s true, but I was hoping it was more a matter of taking my vitamins.

Then Keyes goes on to talk about the Paper Partner, theorizing that one of the reasons writers are so terrified of blank pages is because the page is feral and untamed. Anything that you write on it takes on a life of its own. Characters you like die. Ideas you’re utterly committed to turn out to lack any kind of empirical basis. Once you write something, it exists apart from you. You are no longer in control. Also, it’s pretty much a fact that the story in your mind is never going to be realized as brilliantly on paper as it is in your imagination. He quotes Iris Murdoch, “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea,” and William Faulkner, “I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible” (27).

Okay, so it turns out that there’s a little bit more to the magic cure than I thought. It’s actually: Write something anyway.

So you’re freaking out. Big deal. Everyone freaks out. So what you write is inevitably going to be imperfect. Again, NOT UNUSUAL. Write something anyway.

So even though I am still convinced that I am an utter hack, I’m going to write lots of somethings today – this blog post, a scene in Alpha Flyer, notes for a blog series I’m thinking about doing on graduate school, a case study summary for my dissertation. I’m not writing them perfectly. I’m just writing them anyway.

Despite the sudden overwhelming urge to jump on my trampoline.

Ralph Keyes. The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear. Henry Holt and Co., New York, NY: 1995.

Tagged as: page fright, Ralph Keyes, The Courage to Write