Blank Page For Writing Quotes

Tomorrow, is the first blank page of a 365 page book. Write a good one.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.

I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.

You can't edit a blank page

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

Teddy grinned again. 'Truths are dangerous,' he said. -'Then why are you writing them in a book?' -'To catch them between the pages,' said Teddy, 'and trap them before they disappear.' -'If they're dangerous, why not let them disappear?' -'Because when truths disappear, they leave behind blank spaces, and that is also dangerous.

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

you must not come lightly to the blank page.

Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays 1. A beginning ends what an end begins. 2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full. 3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself. 4. The best time is stolen time. 5. All work is the avoidance of harder work. 6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing. 7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music. 8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear? 9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation. 10. Writer: how books read each other. 11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love. 12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything. 13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough. 14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear. 15. There are silences harder to take back than words. 16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery. 17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself. 18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. 19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism. 20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do. 21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of. 22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday. 23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open). 24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?

BECAUSE EVERY DAY IS STILL A BLANK PAGE, WAITING TO WRITE ITSELF.

If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: "I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.

... I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.

I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.

A writer is very much like the captain on a star ship facing the unknown. When you face the blank page and you have no idea where you're going. It can be terrifying, but it can also be the adventure of a lifetime.

I'm not a big fan of inspiration. I'm too old to sit and wait for the muse to give me a little kiss... I write a lot, and I'm not afraid to make mistakes or to write badly. I can alsways fix something weak and dull. But I can't fix a blank page.

A blank page is no empty space. It is brimming with potential... It is a masterpiece in waiting -- yours.

I write what I want to read. If I were to write what I know, I'd be staring at a blank page forever.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

Your life is a blank page. You write on it.

Nothing listens as well as a blank page.

A blank page has more power than a full page with blind thoughts.

It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.

Writing poetry is like an opiate. When you get hooked on a blank page in the notebook, that attracts you like fireflies in the night, and you just have to translate your thoughts into words. I'm addicted to words.

It all adds up; never discount your efforts, because small efforts build big things. One word doesn't make a novel, but one word does begin a novel, and from that small beginning everything else follows. Even if it's just 'The', write something on that blank page.

One thing I knew about the novelist’s task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

I like to make blank pages darker. It's this thing I do.

You have 365 new blank pages. What will you write on first blank page?

One day, I am going to write a travel guide containing only maps and addresses of hotels, and with the rest of the pages blank. That way, people will have to make their own initery, to discover themselves restaurants, monuments and all the magnificent things that every city has, but which are never mentioned because ' the history we have been taught' does not include them in the list of things you must see.

I spent days and nights staring at the blank page, searching the deepest corners of my mind: who have I been, what have I seen, what did I learn? I thought about all the nights I've spent outside, all the times I laid down to cry and how I took a deep breath every morning and decided to simply go on. Because what else is there to do? Decide that this is it? I quit, I'm done? Oh if I could find words to justify those feelings I've carried. I could write the thickest of books with explosions of emotions from a young girl's lost heart. I could make you see, make you hear, make you feel, at least a tiny fragment of what's out there.

You may not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing it for a year, you go away and you have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble!

You can always fix crap. You can’t fix a blank page.

There's something intimidating, yet exciting about a blank page.

...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...

Life is a blank page on which we write our destiny. A life lived by another’s book is no life at all.

The blank page, otherwise known as the vast playground of the writer's imagination.

You’re right,” he finally said. “You aren’t living a good story.” “That’s what I was saying.” “I see,” he said. “What do I do about that?” “You’re a writer. You know what to do.” “No, I don’t.” Jordan looked at me with his furrowed brow again. “You put something on the page,” he said. “Your life is a blank page. You write on it.

Truths are dangerous," he said. "Then why are you writing them in a book?" "To catch them between the pages," said Teddy, "and trap them before they disappear." "If they're dangerous, why not let them disappear? "Because when truths disappear, they leave behind blank spaces, and that is also dangerous.

The experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful. I just thought, I never want that to happen again.

The Garden Under Snow " Now the garden is under snow a blank page our footprints write on clare who was never mine but always belonged to herself Sleeping Beauty a crystalline blanket this is her spring this is her sleeping/awakening she is waiting everything is waiting the improbable shapes of roots my baby her face a garden, waiting.

What Hemingway jovially called, “bleeding behind a typewriter”, implies quite wordlessly, the question, “What would you open a vein for?” A bleak answer, produces each time that same blank page A righteous one, beats its heart right through the words

Unfortunately, many people suffer from BPS - Blank Page Syndrome. Let's face it: starting to write is scary. Seeing the cursor blinking at you on that bright white screen, realizing that you now have to come up with three or ten or twenty pages of text all on your own - it's enough to give anyone a major case of writer's block!

Don't think too much. There'll be time to think later. Analysis won't help. You're chiseling now. You're passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There's something there. It isn't your business yet to know whether it's going to be prize-worthy someday, or whether it will gather dust in a drawer. Now you've carved the tree. You've chiseled the marbled. You've begun.

Tortured Soul 101: The depth of despair one experiences during the creative process (as experienced say, in an abysmally blank page or canvas) is directly proportional to the scope and power of the work that emerges when it breaks.

1.) Don't get it right. Get it written. 2.) You cannot fix a blank page. 3.) Give yourself permission to write crap. Crap can be fixed. (See #2)

Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations.

It was like I was a blank page waiting for you to write our future together on it.

These books are all blank." "Best kind. Y'can write anything in them. Any book in the world starts with blank pages.

The future will remain unknown. It will remain a secret. A blank page that I get to write myself.

The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it.

I pull out my notebook, turn to a blank page, and write, The ghost of Charles Dickens told me that after he turned over in his grave, he couldn’t go back to sleep. He’s decided to leave eternal rest, reinhabit his decaying body, and exact revenge on you for disturbing his slumber. You’ve been warned. I rip out the page and fold it in half twice, making sure the corners are perfectly lined up. I haven’t had to make a friend since kindergarten, and apparently my tactics haven’t changed much.

There is unequaled satisfaction in composing words on a blank page, sealing them in an envelope, writing an address in my own messy hand, adding a stamp, walking it to the mailbox, and raising the flag. It's like preparing a gift, and I feel like I receive one when a letter arrives....

Nothing writes itself. Left to its own devices, the world will never transform into words, & no matter how many pages of notes & interviews & documents a reporting trip generates, the one that matters most always starts out blank.

Dear Diary, All that she left inside the box was a blank book and a name. You are the book, and I am the name...An-Ya. As you know, my name is printed on your first page. Did She write it? What did She look like as She stood over you with Her pen? Were there tears in Her eyes? Why were you left empty inside?

This is all I have to give you—me.” He lifts his shoulders and his vulnerability rips away a little piece of my heart. “A book with blank pages, weathered edges, and eraser marks, that’s what I am. I need you to paint my future, write my story in permanent marker, just like the mark you left on my heart the day we met.

The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a muse moment interrupted - to watch her scuttle back into hiding with unshared insight remaining on the tip of her tongue - is a wicked irritation. When a writer's eyes glaze over, when she stares off at nothing or appears to be memorizing the lines on a blank page, when she falls asleep at the desk... tiptoe softly. For a writer's greatest desire is to receive inspiration; her greatest nightmare, to have tossed to the wind what could have been captured in words.

The story of who you are, were, will be: you don’t have to accept any of this. If you want, bypass selective editing and let the whole thing go. All of it. Stay on the blank page as long as you want; then write a new story if you like. Just remember that you’ll have to write in roles for other people that they like if you want others to play along.

Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed. Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction. Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white pages seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page? Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it. Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things. Play with syntax. Never want to say anything so strongly that you have to give up the option of finding something better – if you have to say it, you will. Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong. If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. (If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time). Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum: One. Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.

She looked at the empty page, which remained blank, apart from the small wet dots from her tears, for hours. Her mind was a turmoil of sadness, rage, fear and all those emotions that gave her inspiration. However her heart lacked the will as the empty words enclosed her soul pulling it down towards the frenzied ravenous imps that stalked hells pantry....

Blank pages are like monsters that haunt my dreams until I feed them words.

Olivia's heart pittered. A blank page. A pen in hand. Was there anything as exciting? The endless possibilities, the potential for beauty, even genius, waiting for that breath of life.

I read obsessively when I'm writing. I think there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who read incessantly while they write and those who can't read at all, lest their individual voices get overwhelmed, or tainted somehow. I'm the first kind. To use a painfully precious metaphor, I need fixed stars to navigate by, otherwise I get lost in the blankness of the page.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s 10 Rules for Writing: 1.Tragedies make great literature; unfathomable catastrophes (the Holocaust, 9/11) are even better – try to construct your books around them for added gravitas but, since those big issues are such bummers, make sure you do it in a way that still focuses on a quirky central character that’s somewhat like Jonathan Safran Foer. 2. You can also name your character Jonathan Safran Foer. 3. If you’re writing a non-fiction book you should still make sure that it has a strong, deep, wise, and relatable central character – someone like Jonathan Safran Foer. 4. If you reach a point in your book where you’re not sure what to do, or how to approach a certain scene, or what the hell you’re doing, just throw in a picture, or a photo, or scribbles, or blank pages, or some illegible text, or maybe even a flipbook. Don’t worry if these things don’t mean anything, that’s what postmodernism is all about. If you’re not sure what to put in, you can’t go wrong with a nice photograph of Jonathan Safran Foer. 5. If you come up with a pun, metaphor, or phrase that you think is really clever and original, don’t just use it once and throw it away, sprinkle it liberally throughout the text. One particularly good phrase that comes to mind is “Jonathan Safran Foer.” 6. Don’t worry if you seem to be saying the same thing over and over again, repetition makes the work stronger, repetition is good, it drives the point home. The more you repeat a phrase or an idea, the better it gets. You should not be afraid of repeating ideas or phrases. One particularly good phrase that comes to mind is “Jonathan Safran Foer.” 7. Other writers are not your enemies, they are your friends, so you should feel free to borrow some of their ideas, words, techniques, and symbols, and use them completely out of context. They won’t mind, they’re your friends, just like my good friend Paul Auster, with whom I am very good friends. Just make sure you don’t steal anything from Jonathan Safran Foer, it wouldn’t be nice, he is your friend. 8. Make sure you have exactly three plots in your novel, any more and it gets confusing, any less and it’s not postmodern. At least one of those plots should be in a different timeline. It often helps if you name these three plots, I often use “Jonathan,” “Safran,” and “Foer.” 9. Don’t be afraid to make bold statements in you writing, there should always be a strong lesson to be learned, such as “don’t eat animals,” or “the Holocaust was bad,” or “9/11 was really really sad,” or “the world would be a better place if everyone was just a little bit more like Jonathan Safran Foer.” 10. In the end, don’t worry if you’re unsuccessful as a writer, it probably wasn’t meant to be. Not all of us are chosen to become writers. Not all of us can be Jonathan Safran Foer.

Lucifer looked over her shoulder. “What?” Dahlia cleared her throat. “You stupid bitch, I hate you and love you. Do not wear anything Patience gave you, it’s all ugly. I am going to write on every single blank page. Ha-ha! Love, the Faithful slut.” Lucifer scowled. “That person was mean to you.” Dahlia grinned. “No way, Faith was funny. I was the bitch, she was the slut, and Patience was the crack whore.

He sat before a note book of blank pages, saying: I swallow my own words. I chew and chew everything until it deteriorates. Every thought or impulse I have is chewed into nothingness. I want to capture all my thoughts at once, but they run in all directions. If I could do this I would be capturing the nimblest of minds, like a shoal of minnows. I would reveal innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and cowardice and courage. I want to tell the whole truth, but I cannot tell the whole truth because I would have to write four pages at once, like four columns simultaneously, four pages to the present one, and so I do not write at all. I would have to write backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and overtones.

Only a TOTAL DORK would be caught WRITING in a DIARY!! This is THE worst present I have ever received in my entire life! I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs: “Mom, I don’t need a STUPID book with 288 BLANK pages!!

There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run down your leg and into your sock.

If God ever commands the spirit of wisdom to depart from me, well, I reckon that I'll never be able to compose the written word again. Not in music, and not in literature. If there is a blank page before me, it wouldn't matter if my right hand held a thousand dollar ink pen from the House of Montblanc, or an ink pen branded Paper Mate, not one word would be jotted from the ink of either or, and the page would remain blank. ("Primary Blog: The Final Post at the Boutique Domain," 2015)

Plus, the dots are typically very faint, so the book actually looks blank from far away—which means that people who glance at your journal in passing will think you are secretly a witch, because how else would you be able to write such perfectly even rows of text on blank pages?

Susan Griffin describes it as a time when "there is no intrinsic authority to my words." "I...clean off my desk. I make telephone calls. I know I am avoiding the typewriter. I know that in my mind, where there might be words, there is simply a blankness. I may try to write and then my words bore me." But when the time is right, the waiting will have been worth it. "Because each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record." Excerpt from "Thoughts on Writing: A Diary," in The Writer on her Work.

his page still remained to be filled between the gold lion on the crimson shield on top and the blank white shield at the bottom. Ser Gerold Hightower had begun his history, and Ser Barristan Selmy had continued it, but the rest Jaime Lannister would need to write for himself. He could write whatever he chose, henceforth. Whatever he chose . . .

A large class of readers … will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only—a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletive with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does—what feeling it spares—what horror it conceals.

The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.

Again you have got 365 blank pages of your diary. Now you want to write new achievements or old stories... It depends on you.

If you’re going to love a poet you should know this. Our words are our truths. Our blood hums with verse. We break easily. Our words save us. Our stanzas keep us alive. If we loved you at all, we loved you truly. And you will never leave us but live under our skin and beneath the tips of our fingers and in the ink spill on blank page. Because poetry, like some love, is forever.

I like blank paper. To meet people I find interesting. Writing puts me into a world that has not been written yet. I spend much of my time contemplating love and death. When I am writing a surge of complete happiness takes over. To make readers hear the sound of their own heartbeats, that sound that whispers up to us: you are alive. When I manage to turn pages and pages of crap into a little bit of art, I feel like that girl in the Diamonds Are Forever ad. Writing gives me permission to be a child and to play with words the way that children play with blocks or twigs or mud. Writing makes me a god, each new page enabling me to create and destroy as many worlds as I please. It allows me to spy on my neighbors. It’s the only socially acceptable way to be a compulsive liar. I want to cleanse the past. To discover, to express, to celebrate, to acknowledge, to witness, to remember who I am. I find out what might have been, what should have happened, and what I fear will happen. It’s a means of asking questions, though the answers may be as puzzling as a rune. This question drives me crazy. There is nothing else I want to do more. My soul will not be still until the words are written on paper. Because I can. Because I must. I can’t not. If I don’t I will explode. I want to be good at something and I’ve tried everything else.

Famously, the trick to good writing is bleeding onto the page. I picture the male writer who coined this phrase, sitting at his typewriter, the blank sheet before him. What kind of blood did he imagine? Blood from a vein in his arm? Or a leg? Perhaps a head wound? Presumably it was not blood from a cervix. I have so much of this blood, this period blood, this pregnancy blood, this miscarriage blood, this not-pregnant-again blood, this perimenopausal blood. It just keeps coming and I just keep soaking it up. Stuffing bleached cotton into my vagina to stem the flow, padding my underwear, sticking on the night pads ‘with wings’, hoping not to leak on some man’s sheets, or rip off too much pubic hair with the extra-secure adhesive strips. Covering up with ‘period pants’, those unloved dingy underwear choices pulled out from the bank of the drawer every month. And all along, I was wrong. I should have been sitting down at my desk and spilling it across the page, a shocking red to fill the white.

Most anyone who has endeavored to maintain the habit of prayer, or making art, or regular exercise...knows the syndrome well. When I sit down to pray or write, a host of thoughts arise. I should call to find out how so-and-so is doing. I should dust and organize my desk, because I will get more work done in a neater space. While I'm at it, I might as well load and start the washing machine. I may truly desire to write, but as I am pulled to one task after another I lose the ability to concentrate on the work at hand. Any activity, even scrubbing the toilet, seems more compelling than sitting down to face the blank page.

I remember cupping the ash and writing the words live live live on the foreheads of the three women sitting in the room. How the ash eventually hardened into ink on a blank page. How there's ash on this very page.

Even here in these sentences, I place my hands on your back and see how dark they are as they lie against the unchangeable white backdrop of your skin. Even now, I see … your waist and hips as I knead out the tensions, the small bones along your spine, a row of ellipses no silence translates. Even after all these years, the contrast between our skin surprises me–the way a blank page does when my hand, gripping a pen, begins to move through its spatial field, trying to act upon its life without marring it. But by writing, I mar it. I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once. — Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019)

If the passage absolutely demands cursing, be moderate. A little of it goes a long way. I've seen beginning writers pepper curse words through sentence after sentence. 'If you don't -blanking- get your -blanking-blank-blank- in to this house this -blanking- minute, I'm going to -blank- your -blank- and nail it to the -blanking- door.' Two things happen when I read this junk: I get bored and I get angry. I didn't pick up your book to read garbage. If this is as clever as you can be, I don't want to read your prose. In life if you met someone who spoke like this, you'd want to flee. Then why put this stuff on the page? As near as I can determine, this abomination occurs because a writer is corrupted by the awful -blanking- dialog that movies inflict on us these days. It's also a sign of insecurity. The writer wonders if the dialog is strong enough and decides a lot of -blanking-blank- will do the trick. Someone might object that this kind of dialog is realistic in certain situations--intense scenes involving policemen or soldiers for example. I can only reply that in my research I spend considerable time with policemen and soldiers. Few of them curse any more than a normal person would. This garbage isn't realistic. It merely draws attention to itself and holds back the story. Use it sparingly.

Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant. Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave – a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know. The beauty of an author’s style, the music of his sentences have their importance in literature, of course; the depth of an author’s reflections, the originality of his thought certainly can’t be overlooked; but an author is above all a human being, present in his books, and whether he writes very well or very badly hardly matters – as long as he gets the books written and is, indeed, present in them.

Hemingway once said that ‘there is nothing to writing, you just sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’ What Hemingway failed to mention is that bleeding is the easy part. To cut is what makes writing hard. Sitting down to write and hitting that first key or touching the tip of your pen to that blank sheet of paper - that’s the hard part. Once you start - once you spill that first bit of ink and let it bleed into the page, the rest takes care of itself. There’s nothing to it. You just sit there and bleed until it stops. It is not for this reason, but it’s still interesting and worth mentioning that the word ‘write’ comes from the Proto-Germanic word ‘writan,’ which literally meant to scratch, tear, or cut.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

In that uncertain period when Paul and I had been separated for several months but were not yet sure we wanted to get divorced, we sat down together to scan a set of no-fault, do-it-yourself divorce documents we’d ordered over the phone, as if holding them in our hands would help us decide what to do. As we paged through the documents, we came across a question that asked the name we’d each have after the divorce. The line beneath the question was perfectly blank. On it, to my amazement, we could write anything. Be anyone.

Take out a notebook, and at the top of a blank page, write the word curiosity. On the next page, write creativity. On the next, fears and so on, page by page, through ambitions, power, desires, dreams, and other words you might wish to add, and then go back and fill each of those pages with lists of your own. Write down all the things that you’re curious about, all the things you want to create, that you fear, that feel like your power, and keep writing until you’ve filled up all your blank pages with everything inside of you.

Writing down this mission statement is also a great way to "wake the page". That's the term I use to describe the act of marking the page for the first time. It's the moment when thought transcends the distance between our inner and outer world, and we breathe life into our ideas.

But creativity, she doesn’t fit in a box. She’s a wild, fluid, uncontrollable energy that spreads out sensuously from a curious, wide open mind in large expanses of aimless time on dreamy liminal train journeys or in subtle moments between waking and sleep. She can’t be pushed, or coughed up, or beaten into submission by a brutal and unmerciful regime. She needs light, and breath, and space and then, maybe, if the mood takes her, she’ll unfurl her wings and let her colors run into the atmosphere. And this energy, this wild, fun, unpredictable magic that I’d played with so happily as a child, that had flowed through me like it was my very life force up until this point; I didn’t understand it anymore. Creativity was this swirling wild mysterious language, but now I lived in a colorless angular world that promised me a certainty I valued above all else. And where before, I was just scribbling, writing, moving for the mere joy of it, now I tried to commodify my creativity. I tried to squeeze it out and make it do something worthwhile, be special, be important, be good. I could no longer see the point of art if it wasn’t good. But that’s the tricky thing about art, it’s never strictly good or bad, it’s just expression, or excretion. It couldn’t be measure by scales or charts, or contained in small manageable segments in the day. It was always, by its very nature, so imperfect. And the imperfections drove me mad. The anxiety and frustration with my creative endeavors turned into an actual fear of blank pages and pallets of paint. There was too much potential and too much room to fail so day by day, I chose perfection over creativity. I chose no more creativity, and no more mistakes. There are things that eating disorders takes from you that are more important, much greater and more profound a loss, and much much more difficult to recover and restore completely than body fat. And that reckless urge to create, just for the pure, senseless joy of it, would become the one I missed the most.

Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless -- as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it . . . The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I wanted to flee from Thomas's house.

I handed Grandfather a blank book. “What is this?” he asked. “This is yours,” I said. “Yours to write in. You can do it now.” Grandfather opened it. I had written his name--JOHN WITTING--there. He turned the pages and saw them all empty and white. Grandfather put a hand on his chest. “Grandfather?” I was scared. I thought he was sick. Grandfather waved me away. “It isn’t pain,” he said to me. He closed his empty book and looked at me. “It’s love,” he said.

With only three days left of school, yearbooks arrive. There are several blank pages in the back for signatures, but everybody knows the place of honor is the back cover. Of course I’ve saved mine for Peter. I never want to forget how special this year was. My yearbook quote is “I have spread my dreams under your feet; /Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” I had a very hard time choosing between that and “Without you, today’s emotions would be the scurf of yesterday’s.” Peter was like, “I know that’s from Amélie, but what the hell is a scurf?” and honestly, he had a point. Peter let me write his. “Surprise me,” he said. As we walk through the cafeteria doors, someone holds the door for us, and Peter says, “Cheers.” Peter’s taken to saying cheers instead of thanks, which I know he learned from Ravi. It makes me smile every time. For the past month or so, the cafeteria’s been half-empty at lunch. Most of the seniors have been eating off-campus, but Peter likes the lunches his mom packs and I like our cafeteria’s french fries. But because the student council’s passing out our yearbooks today, it’s a full house. I pick up my copy and run back to the lunch table with it. I flip to his page first. There is Peter, smiling in a tuxedo. And there is his quote: “You’re welcome.” --Peter Kavinsky. Peter’s brow furrows when he sees it. “What does that even mean?” “It means, here I am, so handsome and lovely to look at.” I spread my arms out benevolently, like I am the pope. “You’re welcome.” Darrell busts out laughing, and so does Gabe, who spreads his arms out too. “You’re welcome,” they keep saying to each other. Peter shakes his head at all of us. “You guys are nuts.” Leaning forward, I kiss him on the lips. “And you love it!

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.” ― Stephen Fry

- I been here before, haven't I? He just sat there staring out at the plain. Son of a bitch, I thought. He's ignoring me. - Hey, I said, I'm not the dead, not a shade in passing. I'm flesh and blood here. He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and started writing. - You got to at least look at me, I said. After all, it is my dream. I drew closer. Close enough to see what he was writing. He had his notebook open to a blank page and three words suddenly materialized. Nope, it's mine. - Well, I'll be damned, I murmured. I shaded my eyes and stood there looking out toward what he was seeing - dust clouds flatbed tumbleweed white sky - a whole lot of nothing. - The writer is a conductor, he drawled.