Fill a Blank Page (Jacks Talks to Herself)

Editor's Note: Upon reflection, I probably should've given this a few passes before hitting the 'publish' button, but I'm a glass of Scotch in and, in the spirit of fuckitry, Ima leave it as it is.



There’s nothing more disheartening to a writer than an unfillable blank page. For hours I’d sit and watch that stupid cursor line blinking in and out, in and out, in and out, thinking ‘this used to come so easily to me, what is wrong with me, why can’t I do this anymore?’

I fucked up somewhere along the way and forgot something very important—I think it was in graduate school, because it was there  that the act of writing became something that I was frequently doing entirely for other people—and I forgot, rather, entirely suffocated the single most important member of my original audience. More clearly stated, I forgot that my first audience was me. I forgot that what I loved most about writing, my real impetus for writing as a young person, was that the true act of writing was always initially a dialogue with myself. More importantly, writing stopped being a device through which I talked to myself and started being a device through which I talked to other people. I realized that almost every written endeavor in the last five or so years has been an attempt at dialogue with someone else and not first a dialogue with myself.

Oddly enough, the only written creative projects that have been moderately successful are essays I’ve written spontaneously—all of which were fueled by some need inside to have a hard come-to-Jesus talk with myself. That handful of largely off-the-cuff (although certainly later edited and proofed) stories I’ve HAD to just get out or I’d explode have been the stories that have engaged others in a way that good art is supposed to engage people. Frankly, everything else I’ve done in the past five years is shit.

I don’t even feel bad about it, only grateful for the insight. Things went awry. A compounding of unmet desire to spend my life as a writer and the pressure to keep producing work, and keep producing work that was as well-received as the last bit of work I produced, keep ‘em mesmerized. Then top it off with everything that comes with being an ‘emerging writer’: all the advice from professors and other writers grad school colleagues and agents and publishers merged and made a bleak fog in my head so god damned murky that the act of writing became an act of production. I gotta tell you, I started to fucking hate it. I hated it because I forgot how it all started in the first place.

It started because I was a nineteen year old girl about to marry a guy I didn’t love and I wrote a little story about another girl who was set to get married to a guy she didn’t love. I wrote it after visiting my betrothed who was doing an internship in Florida. We fought the whole time. He made me miserable. But I was young, and silly, and I had a one year old to think about and my mother said “This is the best opportunity of your life” and I suppose I didn’t want to disappoint her. I boarded a plane in West Palm Beach and pulled blue, celestial themed writing paper from my carry-on. By the time I changed planes in Nashville, I’d written a thinly veiled story about a girl who was marrying a guy because he was sensible, and not her longtime love, who was not sensible. It was probably a really shit story in retrospect, but still, from Nashville to Kansas City, I combed over the draft, adding details and changing phrasing. The older woman seated next to me asked: “Am I sitting next to a writer?” and I answered yes, though I really hadn’t thought about it before that moment. I never stopped thinking about that woman. I think of her more often than the boyfriend-turned-husband-turned-ex-husband a month later (. . . you can read all about that in the book, when available.)

I forgot this all started because I need to have a dialogue with myself. So much of the body of work I’ve created is nonfiction, focusing on my roles as both main character and omnipresent narrator, who are sometimes at odds with one another. Sometimes, the narrator has to talk to the main character and vice versa. To put it in more universal, metaphysical, non-writer terms: sometimes my soul has to have a talk with my earthbound ego, sometimes my conscious thinker has to talk to my unconscious thinker.

 Writing stopped being a communication device for me, and started being something like a job. All that talk from those in the industry (Who is your target audience? What are you writing this for? Why are they gonna care? Oh that writing style isn’t trendy anymore. Oh this subject matter is popularly published, why don’t you write something about that?)  it muddied my muse river.

The pressure I place on myself is by far the biggest impediment because there came a time when the pressure from the world became so loud, a stadium-sized chant of do-it do-it do-it, and my inside said no no no and all became too much for me.

There’s nothing more disheartening to a writer than an unfillable blank page.

Somehow, and without my noticing it consciously, the thing I did to make sense of the world became something I did to satisfy the needs of other people and not my own need to understand myself. This is not a manifesto shouting ‘fuck what other people think’, although that’s pretty decent advice, generally. The point I’m so circuitously trying to arrive at is that art shouldn’t be made with a lust for what will come of it when it’s finished. Great art is made for the sake of itself. It is first a dialogue with the artist and the muse. I lost all connection to inspiration when I forced myself to think about what would come of my work when it was finished. I stopped talking to myself when I started thinking: Who will read this? Which literary magazine should I send this to? Which essay fits with which thematic publication this deadline cycle?

I’ve talked to so many aspiring writers over the last several years, and so many of them asked the same questions: how can I get my stuff published, do I need an agent, where should I send this, and I wish I could go back and amend every conversation with this advice: Don’t worry about it. Write it. Make it good. Make it make you feel good. Make the words resonate with your soul. Match the emotional with the intellect and let your work tell you what it wants to be.

Let your art first be a conversation with yourself. Fill a page with the words the universe gives you.