It sits there staring back at me. Blinking unceasingly, daring me to go forward. Below it sits nothing, a vast, white, emptiness in which anything can happen. The cursor on my screen plods forward. At first slowly, timid, afraid of the words coming after it. Soon it is blazing across the screen heedless of the trails it makes. Behind my cursor a story unfolds, in front of it stretches an endless wild, where anything can happen.
One of the most intimidating experiences any artist has is the day they first sit down to create something in their chosen medium. There is always a reckoning when your skills and your dreams meet in the real world. It doesn’t matter if you are looking at the blank white page of a modern word processor or a lump of formless clay, the feeling is the same. A sudden heaviness as you realize what you are about to do. A fleeting feeling of doubt. A clawing from deep in the pit of your stomach. When we first reach out for our dreams we are truly adventuring out into the unknown. We can’t imagine that we will be successful but neither can we contain ourselves any longer. Something must be done. Action must be taken. We have no idea where it will take us but we have to find out. I can still remember the first gentle stroke of my paintbrush, the first timid strokes of my pen, the smell of the clay and slurry as it molded to my imagination. They have all shaped me into the person I am today but nothing intimidated me as much as the blinking cursor and blank page that confronted me when I set out to write my first serious manuscript.
That cursor sat at the top of the page. On, off, on again, off again, daring me. Could I really create something like a book? Me? Could I really write something intelligible? Entertaining? Something worth reading? I didn’t know. What I did know is that I would never find out until I tried to write something. That meant I had to venture out into that blank wilderness. So I wrote and rewrote and rewrote that first paragraph, seemingly a hundred times. It was slow going. The whole time I sure I was doing all of it wrong. After thirty minutes I was still looking at a lot of white space. I was intimidated. There was no way I could do this. I was screwing everything up.
Obviously I have gotten over that, since then I have written thousands of pages worth of blog posts, book manuscripts and short stories. Those first days I still remember though. I had to stop and get away. Eventually I had to realize two things. The first was that no one could tell my story. Sure I could set up guidelines and character bios for someone else to write something for me but that would be their story. Only I can tell my stories in my way. Then I had to realize that there is no right way to write. If I had a story to tell then I had to get it out, no matter what. I could work on the mechanics and sentence structure in future revisions. Eventually I worried less and less about doing things right and focused on simply doing them to the best of my abilities.
My cursor still stares back at my when I boot up my word processor. Now though I like to think it blinks with anticipation, waiting to see where it goes next. The white space that once so intimidated me fills me with a bit of excitement. Where will I go? How will I get there? The answers can be found out there in the white space of a blank page.