Blank Page Blues
A Fear Greater Than Death
I have nothing. The bright screen of my Macbook stares back at me. It maintains the same expression it had for the last 3 months:
BLANK.
To the aspiring screenwriter, to the troubled author, to the struggling painter, to the artist, a blank slate can be just as horrifying as it is exciting. Tumblr veterans and Pinterest drones will fool us into thinking that a blank slate is something that’s always good. That it’s a fresh start, a new beginning, the chance to make your dent into an untapped plateau of a new niche. That it’s one of the best cures for the simplest troubles.
What the Tumblings and Pinterites of the world fail to understand that there is a whole other side to the blank slate. There’s an entire world of dread and fear on the other side of that blank piece of paper. It calls us to look within ourselves and spew what we can find on its surface in the name of creative creation. It holds the power to mirror our thoughts, our actions, our words and to form them into something that we can bear to look at again. It begs me to face the honesty of whatever celebration or turmoil that I face and reflect it on it’s very existence so as to have it bare its eyes back on me, begging for approval. In all honesty, it fills me with dread.
Even as I write this, it calls to me from across the room. It wants to know, “Why?”. Why haven’t I gotten further along in that screenplay I started? Why haven’t I finished those business plans I wanted to get going a long time ago? Why haven’t I written that letter that I was supposed to? Why haven’t I emptied the contents of my crowded mind and make that blank space my repository for all that dwells within my thoughts?
It beckons me to be honest. It beckons you to be honest.
That is why that blank page is a fear that dares to outweigh even death itself in the mind of some. I’m a part of that sometimes. It manages to challenge, to repair, to convict, to give, to be both a source of lies and of truths. It bears the power to be both the artist’s sweetest dream or their darkest nightmares. That’s why the blank page represents a start. A hope. A future. It is a cruel, yet fair mistress that does nothing to correct you and leaves you to your own devices. Where this leads is up to the artist.
The blank page is something to be afraid of. In, and only in, that fear the artists create with excellence…or destruction.
P R E V I O U S → Musings of an Art Whore
