The blank page… the hardest part is just starting. Writing whatever comes to your mind and hoping it forms into something better. Spell checking every line to be sure there are no leaks in your structure where someone can belittle your ignorance. Wondering if the world is ready to hear what you have to say. Doubting your own ability to keep their interest very long. Knowing your own limit to wanting to read anything laborious. How do you keep them from falling away from your anecdote without going over the lines in which you actually live? Wondering if people assume you are the characters you write about. Pondering if they assume you have traveled through or wish to live the lives in the stories you write. Fearing judgment. Will you lead others astray? Are you responsible for their actions if they read what you write and want to act out on those temptations? All these elements bring on a profound paralysis as you embark on the new ocean liner of your caffeine driven thoughts. Where will you end up? Who will be affected by the path you lay down? What lives will be changed and will they be affected for the better or for more tragic endings? All these weigh you down. All these fleeting emotions bring wax to your heart and lead to your hands as they type. It is a slow process; a snail’s pace of progress, and yet you hammer on, banging out the tale like a blacksmith of narrative forging the people and places of your imagination through the white hot conflagration of your tortured mind. Smelting the golden yarn in the crucible of your experiences, your unlived hopes, dreams, and conquests. Scraping away the dross and refining the yellow brick passage to your own personal Oz. Who will accompany you? Who will drop by the wayside? Will there even be a wizard at the end to give you knowledge, heart, or courage to examine where you have been? These frigid musings keep us locked in stone, frozen in an antiqued silence with a rich patina of uncertainty. Firmly buckled in our mental strait jackets we writhe in birthing out tortured prose. The process works hard against us like an overwhelming riptide pulling us out to the sea of our undoing and drowning us in the syrup of surging and demanding procrastinations. Nagging constantly at our core. Do you really want to share this notion? Can you bring anyone to anything good? Is there a purpose or higher goal which can even hope to redeem this egotistical blathering of your chaotic mind? Nausea, paralysis, and fear, these are all you are left with as you sit down to write. Will you be the master? Are you the Buonarroti of the hard, marble-white, blank page? Can you remove from it only that which is not the art you wish to express? Is your chisel sharpened enough to begin? Is your mallet unsentimental and your eye clear? Or are your literary offspring just cheap pulp fictional paupers masquerading as kings in fine clothes while the universe gawks at your pathetically naked soul? Only time will tell. But first you must begin. So onward you press!
“It was a dark and stormy night…â€