The dazzle of the blank page can certainly be disorientating. There are too many options and no wrong answers; the whole world is available for inspiration; and just as there is no wrong way to tell your story, there are myriad ways in which you might start. Who are your characters? How do they speak? Who is telling their story, and why? Why is it being told now, in this way?
Too many options can cause writer’s block just as surely as too few. Visualise it and it makes sense: a host of ideas, all struggling to emerge at once, can very easily create a mental bottleneck.
And the danger there is that, in our rush to say something – anything, just to feel like we’re not wasting this precious time we’ve eked out for writing – we can fall back on the tried and tested. Echoing another writer’s style or phrasing, repeating clichés, allowing ourselves to slip back into those well-worn grooves that are the deadly enemy of good writing.
At times like these, it’s worth remembering that we have been told all our lives how to behave. That we are conditioned to seek out the rules so as not to break them, to ask for permission to proceed. We are socialised, and perhaps even hard-wired, to act according to the accepted conventions, to fit in, to adapt to the prevailing wisdoms.
The problem there, of course, is that this all runs contrary to the writing of interesting fiction.
I’m not saying that good fiction requires the breaking of every rule, or a wilful disregard for every single literary convention. What I’m saying is that the blank page is both a challenge and an opportunity, and that every interesting writer implicitly understands what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich made explicit: that well-behaved women seldom make history.
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