Who's Afraid of an Empty Page?

Not me, not any more. I started blogging as a way to improve my writing, both in quality and quantity. Quality is much harder to self-judge, but I occasionally ask people like Trevor or Olympia what they think and I've had generally positive feedback.

Quantity, though, I can judge for myself. I always wanted to write when I was younger, but I'd get what many frustrated authors and artists get: fear of the empty page. How do you take the perfectly clean piece of white paper (or its digital equivalent) and dare to mark it with your lines?

A clean sheet of paper has a certain elegance to it. A piece of paper with your markings is changed. It no longer has the basic simplicity of a blank sheet and the complexity added may no longer have elegance. Let's face it, you may well have just ruined it. After a certain age, when quality and a desire to be excellent kicks in, ruining stuff that way is something we avoid. Little kids don't have this problem. Just watch a three year old with a stack of blank paper and a crayon. He'll go through twenty sheets, drawing grotesque and unidentifiable squiggles on each, in under three minutes if you let him. Some of the kids that keep it up become the famous artists of three decades later.

I realize my fear of the empty page is gone. My next post here will be number 250 since I started this blog over a year ago. When I comment on others' blogs, I find my comments are sometimes longer than their posts, but they just flow out of my head and onto the (digital) page. Hopefully, most of that is of value. (OK, I think it is. Setting aside the humility for a moment, I do feel my writing quality has improved significantly over the past year, and I don't think I was so bad to begin with. Now it would be up to you, the reader, to tell me I'm wrong instead of being not-so-subtly encouraged to tell me I'm right. I think it's easier that way.)