Un-Blank the Page
EPISODE 041: UN-BLANK THE PAGE
Few things are as paralyzing as the pressure placed upon us by the blank page, or whatever version of that applies to you. It’s like those guys who used to find out I was a comedian and demand that I “say something funny.” There was no better way to make sure I then said something profoundly un-funny. You’re not the only one that feels like the blank page demands that you “do something creative!” Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Very few things in the creative life intimidate us and paralyze us into doing nothing the way the blank page does, or whatever version of the blank page applies to the almost infinite expressions of creative work you might fill your days with. Whatever you do in your creative life there is an equivalent of the blank page, a moment (sometimes a very long moment) in which there is nothing in front of you but possibility, the need to start, and the fear of getting the first steps wrong and irrevocably messing it up.
To me, the blank page is like that guy who used to find out I was a comedian and tell me to “Say something funny!” It happened all the time and there’s just too much pressure in that moment and almost no better way of making sure I said something truly un-funny or, for that matter, just making me feeling like an idiot.
The blank page looks back at all of us, and says, tauntingly: “do something creative!” and you’re not the only one that finds that kind of pressure paralyzing. I’m David duChemin and this is episode 041 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.
Music / Intro
The creative life is a battle with–or, to look at it more positively, an exploration of–uncertainty. Whether it’s a battle or an exploration probably depends on the day and how much courage we can muster. When we head into new territory there are no maps, no trail markers, and no trailhead that says, “Go that way, loop around to the right, keep an eye out for bears, and we’ll see you back here in 3 hours."
There’s none of that. It’s more like someone handing you a pure white sheet of paper, and a sharpie marker, and dropping you in the middle of the woods and saying, “Good luck!” No wonder it’s terrifying.
I’ve always marvelled at those who explored uncharted places for the first time, setting off with nothing but hunches, rumours and a sailboat full of inevitable mutineers. The first of them wouldn’t have had a map at all. In fact it would have been up to them to make the map. All they had was a blank piece of paper. Can you imagine setting out with a map like that?
Well of course you can. We do it everyday we create. Sometimes we sit down to work on a map in progress, some days we’re putting the final touches on that map and signing our name in the corner. But the next day, it’s back to a blank piece of paper and we’re thinking, well now what? Because unless you’re repeating yourself, each new project takes us off in a direction we haven’t mapped and though now and then we might loop back and feel like we’re looking at familiar landmarks, thinking, “haven't I been here before?" even those don’t help us much if we’re determined to explore unfamiliar territory by doing or making something new.
Seen like an exploration, our creative lives become less about getting things right, or even about getting to a specific place, but about finding out what places are there at all.
Seen as discovery, creative work is freed from the blinding effects of our expectations. The moment we imagine we’re heading somewhere very specific and that the landscape getting there is going to look a certain way, or that it should, we stop seeing what’s actually there, and we start freaking out when things feel like they’re going in the wrong direction. We stop enjoying our momentum and things we’re seeing for the first time, and our wonder gets replaced by doubt. We start questioning why it’s taking so long and whether or not we missed our turn. How many of us can stay in Flow when we’re thinking all these things and wondering if we should just turn around and head back to the last point things looked familiar?
It’s tempting, right? To go back to what worked before and just do that again? But ultimately that’s never the solution. Sure, use what you’ve learned before, and no, there’s no real value in reinventing the wheel, but once you’ve got the wheels that work for you use them to explore new territory. One of the benefits of embracing the idea of exploration is that it stretches us, and teaches us, and makes us into the person we need to be to make work that is new and unfamiliar.
Our work making some new thing is always done in uncertainty and the sooner we re-calibrate the way we deal with uncertainty, and embrace a way of thinking that sees exploration as our first and most exciting task, the sooner the blank page will feel less inhibiting and more like an invitation. When our focus is on making the end product and not the process - destination rather than journey - we focus on questions like: “is this the right step in that direction?” and, “am I getting closer?” and there are almost no helpful answers to those questions. When you ask instead, “I wonder where this next step leads?” or “how can I use this?” and you allow yourself to make your task the discovery of the answers, then the uncertainty of it all is part of the magic; it’s full of possibility.
I wonder if we fear the blank page because deep down we’re aware of how important the start of anything is, like we have one chance to start this thing right and we don’t want to screw it up. But do we? Have one chance, I mean. When I’ve talked with others about the fear of the blank page it often comes down to this feeling that once we put a mark on that blank page, you’re saying: “Here. This is where I begin,” and you’re bound to that direction and immediately limited in your choices. So we deliberate. "Is this the best way to begin? What about beginning over here or in a different way? I just don’t know." But just asking the questions, just deliberating doesn’t help because it doesn’t answer the question. It can’t. Thinking really hard about it for longer is no substitute for beginning and exploring and finding actual answers.
What’s important is not so much HOW we start but THAT we start. What’s important is that you get exploring as quickly as possible because it’s only then, as you react to the work (not just all the hypothetical ideas about the work) that you can more meaningfully answer your questions about which direction feels right to you. You cannot know until you’re moving. Anything else is guessing.
That makes the first steps important but not so much that they should intimidate us into not making them. First steps almost never determine where you must go next. They aren’t permanent and they rarely lock us in. And when you look at it all as an exploration, neither does the second or third step. If you only had one piece of paper, sure. I could see why this might freak you out. But this is why erasers, red pens, and delete buttons were invented. It’s why Staples sells paper by the ream and the palette, not by the single sheet. Let’s not be too precious about that blank page in front of us, there are millions more where that one came from.
It probably helps to remember that creativity is about improvisation and there are no errors in improvisation because there’s no specific agenda. You can’t end up in the wrong place if you have no pre-determined destination but are there, instead, to see what you can find. To explore.
When you improvise, one of 2 things happen: you can make something amazing and unexpected, or you can learn something from the effort which gets you closer to making something amazing (and probably still unexpected). Viewed as exploration every step in the process leads you to something that you can use. And I think that’s helpful. But you can always start over. As many times as you need to. Even when your particular creative work does have an agenda and needs you to end up in a specific place.
So, practically speaking, how do you get over the paralysis of the blank page? I think the answer is obvious: Un-blank the page as quickly as possible.
This is what starting ugly does. It leap-frogs the expectations of perfection and the fear of doing it wrong and it helps us get faster to momentum and discovery, the two things that WILL actually get us where we’re heading, though we usually only ever find that out in hindsight.
This didn’t used to be so hard. How many of us spent hours with a box of crayons or with bucket of Lego spilled out on the living room floor, just building whatever came to mind and seeing where it all led, before pulling it all apart and starting again? We weren’t so precious about it because nothing was really at stake. We’d do it just for the joy of the play and exploration. We didn’t hold back because we never felt like we had anything to lose and nothing we built couldn’t be re-built.
When it came to drawing I don’t think I ever hesitated. Not when I was really young. There was no fear of the blank page, or–for that matter–the blank wall. I could colour my way through a stack of paper scribbling faster than my mother could say “Mommy needs those papers for work!”
What ever happened to scribbling? Or to crayons for that matter? I used to scribble for hours, burning through a box of crayons like it was a competition to get to the bottom. As I got older the boxes of crayons got bigger until I finally got that coveted box of 64 crayons with the sharpener inside. That’s when I got really serious. And that’s when the scribbling stopped, and eventually I took to pencils because pencils could be erased and the older I got the more conscious I became of the so-called errors I was making.The less willing I was to take risks. The more careful I became with that blank page. Good for the trees, but lousy for my creativity, and before you discard the idea of scribbling as childish or meaningless, remember that children don’t call it scribbling. Adults do. Kids just call it drawing. You see a mess of lines, but they see a horse, a fish, or a house under a smiling sun. Whether we call it scribbling or not is a matter of expectation, not about whether we learn from the efforts or find meaning in the results.
I’d like to see a return to scribbling. A couple years ago adult colouring books became a big thing, their rise to popularity credited to a Scottish woman named Johanna Basford who made millions of dollars from the unlikely venture. Joined now by others keen to cash in on the trend, Basford made an industry of colouring books for adults and I don’t doubt for a moment that they have their appeal to some. After all, they’re exactly what adults need. They require no real artistic skill so the barrier to entry is almost non-existent. They demand no real decision-making other than deciding whether to use lime-green or chartreuse, nor does it matter if you can’t tell the difference in the first place. There is no possibility of doing it wrong so long as you stay between the lines. They encourage no risk, they present no challenge. They might relax you, but I’m not sure they encourage exploration or imagination.
What I want to invent is the adult scribbling book, though I admit there are some bugs to be worked out. I just don’t see people shelling out $30 for a book of blank pages. Though I could offer it as a downloadable PDF so you didn’t have to pay shipping. Just print off the 50 blank pages and you’re on your way!
But I wonder if a return to scribbling wouldn’t do more for us than yet another chance just to colour between the lines. Don’t we get enough of that every day? Do we really need yet another encouragement to believe that there is a right way to make art and a wrong way, or another chance to escape the perceived tyranny of the blank page and so never learn to respond to the invitation that blank page offers?
The difference between a colouring book and a stack of paper is that the colouring book doesn’t ask us to do the hard work of starting and so we never get good at it. We never become comfortable with the endless possibilities of the blank page. Colouring books don’t invite us to explore, to step out on a limb and see where things are leading after we take the first few steps onto the otherwise blank page. And they frown darkly on scribbling.
The blank page, or whatever its equivalent in any discipline is an invitation to scribble your heart out, to explore with no expectations. To improvise with no pressure to create a masterpiece. It’s an unselfconscious starting place that sees the blank page not as a thing to be feared but as an invitation to make your mark and see where it leads no matter how many sheets of paper you need to burn through to get there.
Why I think this matters is because the creative life doesn’t offer us many pre-drawn colouring pages, so the ability to stay between the lines is neither deeply satisfying nor very valuable. I want to tell you that everyday is a blank page, but even that isn’t right. It’s a pile of blank pages, a ream of paper that’s 86,400 sheets high if you allow yourself a page for every second, and that’s pages enough to take risks, to explore, to backtrack when you hit dead ends and begin again. Every day of our lives is an invitation to scribble wildly, and if the pandemic in which we now find ourselves is teaching us anything it’s that everything is uncertain and there are no lines within which to colour safely. Now is the time to scribble.
Un-blank the page, my friend. Do it as quickly as you can and make some lines. Follow your whim and curiosity. See where they lead. But whatever you do, don’t leave the page blank. That book of blank pages doesn’t get returned for a refund at the end. There is no damage deposit for those of us who get to the end of today, or our life-long string of days, without making a mark. The sooner you start making lines, the sooner you’ll begin to see where they're going and the longer you’ll have the astonishing joy of discovering within those scribbles the horse, the fish, and the house under a smiling sun.
Thanks so much for listening. If you’re looking for more help with the blank page and getting started, check out my latest book Start Ugly, The Unexpected Path to Everyday Creativity which can be found at Amazon, your favourite bookstore, or through the links at StartUglyBook.com.
Thanks so much for being part of this. If you’d like to get in touch with me, with feedback, questions or ideas you’d like to see explored in a future episode, I’d love to hear from you and you can email me at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com. Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0