Pages

The tyranny of the blank page. The white computer screen. The emptiness behind one’s eyes when the words refuse to form. False starts and fragments. Half-formed sentences, and paragraphs that go nowhere.

You can’t see it, but according to Word, the five sentences above have been flagged ‘incomplete’, underlined in tell-tale wavy green. This makes me laugh.

How do writers do it? Writers are my heroes and my heroines, have been since I was five. My bookshelves are full of words and stories, thousands of pages of sentences and paragraphs and chapters, characters and plotlines and ideas and themes and climax and conclusion. Writers are magicians, pulling rabbits from hats, cutting women in two, vanishing a cage of doves before your eyes.

Sometimes I think I glimpse the truth of what they do. Sometimes I think I catch the sleight of hand, or see the assistant behind the curtain. I have learned a few of the simplest card tricks. I can even convince an audience, at a distance, that I have sawed my lovely assistant in two. I can dazzle with pyrotechnics, I know the ways of smoke and mirrors, but I fear I lack true skill. Up close, my illusions are revealed to be nothing more than simple tricks.

Maybe all of the words have been used up. Maybe that’s why I can’t write, why I can’t find the plot.

While I’m writing this, or attempting to write this, the TV is on, and I’m watching Oprah out of the corner of my eye. A woman whose 11-year-old son committed suicide is describing the moment she walked into her son’s room and found him hanging from an electrical cord.

An awful part of me is hoping I can steal that terrible moment - the pain of the mother and her son that I have never met, but have now cried for – and pull some inspiration from it.

Good writers are magicians. The rest of us are scavengers. We pick at the scraps, we pull flesh from bone, we study the entrails for the truths left behind. When I cannot find the words I’ve been searching for, I go to The Waste Land, Sylvia Plath, Bullfinch’s Mythology, Patti Smith, all the carcasses I’ve picked nearly clean over the last fifteen years. I’m not sure I want to scavenge anymore, though. I want to tell truths with my magic. I want to create illusions that cannot be seen through. No more simple tricks.

The awful, endless tyranny of the blank page. Stare too long into the abyss, and the abyss stares back at you. False starts and fragments.

Fill the page with words.