The Land of Blank Pages

I haven't been here in a while - the Land of Blank Pages.

This is the land you live in while you're writing your first draft, and it is so harsh that only the few survive. Most of the people who think they would "like to write a novel someday" turn back early on. The Land of Blank Pages is not for the faint of heart, and many do not make it.

I've come to the realization that revising is easy because of a simple visual fact: the page you're looking at is full of black and white. It's only a matter of taking the black bits and rearranging them in various ways. But they're there, at least.

But the pure white page - oh, man.

It's terrifying.

The fear can be overcome. Just remember: 1) hey, it's fun to make up stuff and 2) the alternative is to never, ever write anything again. To me, that idea is so insupportable that I just keep going. You put one word after another, one sentence after another, the same way you walk up a hill. It's nice to stand at the bottom and wish you had a ride, but wishing isn't getting you up the hill any faster.

When writers misbehave, they go to Hell and Hell is just blank pages, thousands and thousands of them, and they haunt you and never go away. That's why writers are well-behaved people. We don't want to go there. We're scared.

Abby