The Writer’s Cure for Blank Page Syndrome

How to write well without trying and to start without starting

The blank page is a cruel temptress. We’ve all wrestled with it. Especially writers like me, who are more on the pantser side than the plotting side. We all know the Hemingway quote about bleeding on the page. We’ve heard the same old advice about eliminating writer’s block and all the re-hashed writing tips that seem to repeat themselves forever.

Writer’s block isn’t real, but that doesn’t make the blank page less intimidating.

What hits us when we face the blank page, is not writer’s block, but ourselves. This is the phenomenon Steven Pressfield named the Resistance in his must-read book, The War of Art.

You are the enemy

— Steven Pressfield

As writers we depend on our minds to create our work. We don’t get a physical lump of clay or block of wood. We don’t have the luxury of blueprints nor wiring diagrams. We must take our own chances and develop our work from nothing — using our heads.

These are the very heads that fight against us — the mind that wants to keep us doing what we’re doing and never to try anything that makes us uncomfortable.

The blank page makes us very uncomfortable.

Artist and writer, Austin Kleon tells us to play with blocks when we’re feeling blocked. Literally. Austin shares a story of writer Lawrence Weschler who plays with his own set of blocks (his daughter is not allowed to touch them) in order to flesh-out difficult parts of his story.

Weschler uses his blocks for days or weeks at a time, until he finds the a-ha moment for his story. He doesn’t sit and stare at the page, he engages his creative, subconscious mind indirectly by playing with blocks as his mind works on the problem in the background.

The blank page is devoid of art.

When we sit and stare at the blank page we’re using our conscious mind to try and force the writing. Our conscious mind is very small in power compared to the large potential of the subconscious. The only problem is you can’t tell the subconscious what to do. This part of your brain needs the proper food for thought, but must do its best work on its own schedule.

If we try and access the subconscious by somehow digging around for good ideas, we’re really using our conscious mind and trying to force creativity at a surface level.

The blank page represents our conscious mind.

I’ve found when I write with my conscious ideas, these are the ones that aren’t good. Conscious ideas are the obvious answers — the butler did it, kind of thing. The eye rolls you watch on poorly-produced television. The predicable books and movies you put down halfway through.

The scariest moment is always just before you start

— Stephen King

Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck shares the power of overcoming the blank page in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Dweck writes about the difference between the fixed and growth mindset. And how we can only get through the blank page if we adopt a growth mindset. We need perseverance in the face of adversity.

Dweck mentions that not only will we come up with higher levels of achievement with the growth mindset, but we’ll also feel more empowered — a greater sense of free will.

The path

The cure for the blank page start with more doing and less thinking. If we want to develop our best writing we’ve got to write more often and think about getting started less often.

Writing is not like riding a bike.

The creative parts of your brain atrophy if you don’t use them. We make the strongest connections for the behaviors we practice frequently. If we don’t write often, the brain won’t take this behavior as something it needs to protect, allowing other habits to strengthen in its place.

If we want to prevent that page from staying blank long, we’ve got to practice our craft frequently.

Ideas begat more ideas. The more we try different angles in our writing the more often we’ll get good ideas. So, we write every day. This is step one to the blank page syndrome. If we write every day we won’t necessarily write something good every day, but we’ll train our subconscious minds to keep processing the story until it uncovers an idea we can use.

The blank page is a gift.

If we re-frame the blank page as a gift instead of an obstacle, we give ourselves permission to try new ideas. There’s no preconception with the blank page. There are no pre-written ideas with which we’ve got to conform the rest of our ideas. This is nothing but pure opportunity.

We give ourselves constraints.

If we place boundaries around our work the writing becomes easier, not harder. When you give yourself no limitations for writing there are too many options.

Boundaries include:

• Size of story — novel, short, article…
• Genre constraints — fiction, non-fiction, thriller, romance, western, sci-fi
• Chapter length
• Word count
• Point of view
• Writing style

When we create self-imposed boundaries we give ourselves more focus on the work ahead — hence, on making the blank page less blank.

We write no matter what.

Whether we feel like it or not, we write. We start. We don’t think about writing something good. We don’t try to force the work. We start. The cure for the blank page is making it not blank.

We write every day. We keep the creative muscles exercised. We cut. We keep. We edit. We write again.

We need your page to cease its blank-ness

We want to read your work. We need less of them and more of you. We want your work to thrive so we’ll have more of it for ourselves.

As Pressfield says, the enemy is us. We’ve got to get out of our own way and allow the process to happen. But the writing will only come if we get to work — if we treat writing as a blue-collar vocation and something fancy that belongs on a shelf.

We write well when we’re not trying to write well. We write. When our subconscious get a hold of the story we become little more than transcriptionists.

This is flow. This is where good writing comes from.

When we don’t try to start and decide to start instead, we write well without writing and start without starting. We accept Carol Dweck’s growth mindset. We adopt Steven Pressfield’s work ethic. We play with blocks as Austin Kleon shares, to help remove our conscious mind from the creative process.

No more blank pages.

We’re waiting for you.

August Birch (aka the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.

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