TERROR OF THE BLANK PAGE
Please don’t ask! I’m between projects!
What do you think would be the worst question to ask a writer who’s just finished rolling out a six-book time travel series that took her 12+ years to complete?
Contenders include:
a) What’s your next project? (Only ask this if you actually want to kill them!)
b) What are you writing now? (“Well, now I’m talking to you!” will invariably be the response, with a nervous laugh and desperate hope of no follow-up questions.)
c) Do you think you’ll ever write again? (Might as well take a samurai sword to their belly and scrawl LOSER in blood on their forehead.)
We don’t know what’s next! We’re stuck. Terrified that the storytelling magic has deserted us. For alchemy is definitely involved when a novel-length story comes together well. Most writers are part-pantser/part-plotter which is to say that, for at least some of the writing time, we’re stumbling around in the dark, not sure what we’re doing or where we’re going (or what our name is). Creating a story that hangs together well in these conditions is nothing short of a miracle!
It’s been a while since I stared at a blank page. I’d forgotten how glaringly white it is. How brazenly it dares me to mark it. Before releasing The Time Travel Chronicles, I saw the empty page as full of possibilities. Now, it looks like a threat. With its white-eyed wink, it says: ‘You’ll never do this again! Everyone will know!”
-You writing yet, Mum?
-Just doing some washing first!
-You washed everything in the house yesterday. Even the dog blankets.
-Well, I have to…clean our shoes. Clean footwear is important!
-My shoes are so shiny I need sunglasses to put them on.
-Well, perhaps the neighbours’ shoes need a polish!
It’s daunting on an epic scale beginning anew after working with one project for as long and as intently as I did with the six-book YA The Time Travel Chronicles. Madison and Riley and Jester and Captain Crowe and the others felt so real to me; I knew them as well as I know any real-life friends. Better. Which made it easy to imagine their responses, their motives, their dreams.
Where once was activity, now there’s vacancy. Where rivers of imagination flowed in a torrent, a vast desert of swirling sands remains. Names, disembodied, disconnected, fly about in the void. Who are these new characters? What are they like? I don’t know…yet. But it’s time to start figuring them out—their strengths, weaknesses, loves, hopes and darkest secrets. To begin snow-ploughing through the dazzling white and filling in hundreds, thousands, tens-of-thousands of details necessary for a long, rich story.
But just as the blank page terrifies me, it also calls to me. I push through the hard parts—the uncertainties of plot, word choice, doubts about whether my writing is good enough—clawing my way to The End. I’m hoping to get that feeling again—the high of creating something from nothing, some you’re proud of. An incredible feeling.
Yes, writing is a drug. We scribes are junkies all, constantly chasing that high. We endure personal Hells of stiff necks and self-doubt to get our fix.
I stare at the white screen. My heart beats in time with my fingers clacking across the keyboard. As I catch a distant strain of story music, I rush towards it.
Wish me luck!
