September Issue, written by Gordon B. White
The Horror Inherent in ... The Blank Page
By Gordon B. White
I have to have a way to start these things.
The first obstacle is always the need to break the tyranny of the blank page. That smooth, featureless expanse is a wall that must be scaled but without a hand- or foothold. As we’ll get to, I believe that the blank page is so daunting because a horror hides behind its empty face. But to begin practically, where does one start?
Generally, what I have to do is try to find something: An image. An idea. A voice. A constraint. Those are seeds that grow / snowballs that snowball downhill / tadpoles that grow into frogs.
After procrastinating for months, I came up with that opening line in the shower. Before I even knew what this was going to be about, I was letting words stream through my head beneath the water, catching a few in my throat, testing how they felt and tasted. When that sentence came, though, I heard it as clearly as if someone else had said it. It’s not flashy—maybe it’s even a little staid—but it’s declaratory. It feels authoritative, but a little personal. It’s enough to start.
What if I don’t stumble onto an anchor line like that? Or, heck, even with an opening line, how do we develop on that to conquer the horrific empty page? Generally, I need some fodder and, lucky you, I have some exercises, examples, and tactics for finding these that I’ll share below.
On rare occasions, though, an organizing idea will emerge on its own. There will be some morsel of an idea I’ve been gnawing on / worrying over / obsessing on and had thought I’d swallowed, but as I say that anchor bit to myself again and again—here, I have to have a way to start these things—there will be a tickle at the back of my (mental) throat. I cough / gasp / heave—and there it is.
Today is one of those days when an idea crawled right up and said, “Hello.”
Here’s an idea generation exercise and an example. Let’s call it: The List
Take a prompt—any prompt—and just start listing things that fit. There are only two requirements: (1) you must physically write or type it out, this way you won’t repeat the same things but generate new ideas; and (2) you must list a lot of things, we’re talking 10, 20, 50, 1000. You must exhaust the surface / obvious / already done things and dig deeper.
For writing a horror story, a good place to start might be listing your fears. Remember, though, you need to keep going. Get more granular, more specific, more personal, more weird. If you tap into one vein—sharks, the ocean, lakes, krakens, pirates—exhaust it and then keep going—those statues on the bow of the pirate ship, living statues, people who are made into statues, people who are part statue. Surprise yourself!
Maybe a practical example would help? If you were going to write an article about, oh, say, the horror inherent in some particular topic, you might do it this way:
The Horror Inherent in ______
Spiders
Violence
Romance
Humanity
Empty Spaces
Liminal Spaces
Your own head
My own head
Lakes
Water, deep
Water, not deep
The fall
The weather
Seattle
Death
My father’s death
My family after death
What comes next
Nothing
Nothingness
The empty page
At this point, there are no wrong answers. We are just generating material. And hey, we’ve already triumphed over one blank page by making The List! We did that by lowering the stakes so low we couldn’t help but succeed—no right or wrong, just ideas!
Of course, there’s another blank page waiting just over there for the actual story / article / masterpiece. But we’ll get to that one and the horror lurking within in a few minutes.
The List will give you many ideas, any one of which might be the beginning of a new piece of work. But we can take it a step further too: we can put these ideas together to come up with premises richer than any single one on its own. We can test combinations to see what bits start to cohere together, complimenting or contrasting each other. Also, too, we might be able to see that there’s a certain gravity or undertow, a direction that the ideas are flowing in. And that might help draw up other ideas.
Back to the article:
I said that this is one of the days when an idea crawled right up. You see, I had done the exercise above and found that flow of the ideas was pulling me towards something internal. Something existential. And with that spark / pull / lure, it caught onto an idea that had already been going around in my head / heart / stomach recently but that I didn’t connect to this article, which is:
How do you define “horror”?
And by you, I mean me.
There isn’t really a need to define horror; certainly not for a writer in the drafting stage, at least. Genres are buckets that the work gets plopped into on the backend, right? Right, sure. But this is part of how one addresses the blank page—you take an idea and you play it out.
So, I’d been thinking about how I define horror. In the past, I’ve gone through lots of variations on a theme: “It’s a flavor, not a genre”—that’s something I say when I’m feeling sassy. “It’s literature designed to invoke a sense of unease”—that’s probably more standard. “Unease.” “Fear.” “Destabilization.” All of those work.
But where I am now – by which I mean in my life as an artist (because that’s another trick to conquering the blank page is to treat everything you do with a sense of importance and worth, even if not necessarily seriousness) is asking myself: What in that definition of “horror” makes it different from other genres of destabilization – such as the Weird or the Uncanny? This is something I’d tossed around a fair bit, and what I’ve come on is the following working / provisional / fake definition:
Horror is an effect that destabilizes and/or defamiliarizes the status quo with an active threat of harm.
The Weird destabilizes, the Uncanny defamiliarizes, but these are not inherently horror. Where does the “horror” come in, then? For the purposes of this article and for my work in the present and just filling a page, I will suggest that “horror” comes when the disruption no longer just upends the familiar but results in or is accompanied by a threat of harm.
Ah, but what kind of harm?
Here’s another example and an exercise. Let’s call this one: The Voice.
As the name suggests, I spend time working and reworking some piece of text to develop a distinct narrative voice. By this I mean the rhythm and diction to the prose; the vocabulary it uses, meaning both words and metaphors; what kind of information it notices or focuses on; and what kind of judgments it holds about the things it is describing.
Why should you spend time developing a narrative voice before you know exactly what your narrator is even going to be talking about? Because once you know how a narrator sounds, it’s much easier to imagine not only how they’ll speak but also what they’ll say in the first place.
(I also firmly believe that each narrator is a unique character apart from the author and, as such, should have a unique voice that informs the attention / emotion / diction of a story’s telling and that who they are telling it to is another serious consideration, but that’s another article.)
You can work on The Voice by taking a paragraph—any paragraph but often the first—and working it over, making tweaks, until you find the voice coming through. I have a friend that agonizes over the first paragraph until he hears the voice crystal clear and then, he swears, the rest of the story writes itself. Take a paragraph and try it now—don’t stop until you can hear the voice as if it was in the room with you.
You can also find The Voice by writing quickly, letting the momentum guide you to discovery and leaning into the various trends and tics as you go. Look back over a page and see what’s bubbling beneath the surface of the narration and then consciously bring some of those elements to the fore as you edit. Soon the sentences will begin to bend themselves around that voice and the flow will take over.
For example, here I’ve been developing the voice of this article the whole time. This one is breezy, conversational. You’ll notice that I’ve been using a fair number of parenthetical asides (unless my editor took them out), which is a way to develop that kind of comfortable discursiveness. But I’ve also adopted a way of listing three items divided by slashes—such as, “gnawing on / worrying over / obsessing on” or “cough / gasp / heave”—which is not something I normally do. I don’t know where that came from, but it developed for this piece and, by leaning into it, I find it easier to describe / detail / lie about my process.
Back to the article:
So, at this stage, I’ve begun the article. I came up with a starting sentence that broke the blankness. I developed some ideas with the listing exercise and that also drew up an idea on defining horror that I didn’t know would work for this topic, but seemingly does. I’ve begun to draft it, leaning into a voice that has emerged and also seems to fit. The blank page has been conquered!
Or has it?
You see, now that we have some words down and some direction, the blank page holds less fear for us. Less horror. But still … some horror? Yes, I think so. Every blank line holds some echo of that first blank page—diminished, I will grant you—but what is it and why?
What is the horror of the blank page? Surely there must be some, or else why am I a month late even starting to write this column, much less turning it in? Surely not laziness. Not if you saw the way I had to white-knuckle my way into it.
I put it again to you, dear reader (and this familiarity is an elaboration of The Voice tactic I discussed above), that the blank page is not just a source of horror but is, in fact, a horror itself.
Think back to my definition of “horror” above—Horror is an effect that destabilizes and/or defamiliarizes the status quo with an active threat of harm—and let’s break it down.
In the first instance, it is a destabilization or a defamiliarization of the status quo / the banal / the usual. So, checkmark: the blank page is empty, which is decidedly not the normal state of affairs.
There is a pseudo-philosophical question intended to goad out proofs of God which goes, roughly, like this: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” The answer is, probably, something to do with a Creator. But what’s curious is that it’s framed in a way that takes for granted that nothing is the default state and something is the oddity / the miracle / the aberration. But is that really the case?
Only for philosophers and other fools, I’d say. For the rest of us, the default is something. There is a world full of television programs / people / cheeseburgers distracting us from our laptops / keyboards / pens. All of you writers out there right now are nodding to yourselves. There is so much something out there, you say, what I wouldn’t give for a nice cool glass of nothing!
Well, that’s the blank page.
The blank page is the nothing that upends the natural order of all the somethings. It is an expanse where there should be life and texture but isn’t. It is an emptiness—a flat absence—not even a hole because a hole is in something, whereas a blank page just … is.
But that blankness isn’t scary, you may say. Not horrific. Not inherently.
And that’s right. I agree. Blankness can be Weird or Uncanny (or even “Eerie,” if we’re using Mark Fisher’s terminology from The Weird and the Eerie) but those aren’t necessarily negative. In fact, I have argued elsewhere (and will again!) that Weird fiction can be a fiction of liberation because it is, in fact, an upending / rejection / side-step of the old order. And when the old order is gone, a character / person / writer is free to make their own meaning.
But this essay is about “horror.” The Horror Inherent in the Blank Page.
Here’s another strategy I use when I’m trying to conquer a blank page. For lack of a better name, let’s call it: Cool Shit
I just start writing things I think sound like some Cool Shit. I go and go and don’t restrain myself on length or topic or even what kind of thing I’m writing; I just go with the flow. Eventually, a certain something will grab me: a particular snippet, maybe – an image I like, a phrase that captures a narrative voice; a bit of dialogue or a motion that shows a character. And maybe I’ll try to tease something further out of those. And maybe sometimes those grow into full people, places, scenes, sounds.
This is like the idea generation exercise above, except more fully formed in some ways (full fragments of text!) and in some ways less constrained (not just “fears” or “the horror inherent in ______”) but anything that’s Cool Shit. Eventually, one of those fragments sticks. It calls into being another scene / phrase / image. And then another.
Things might even begin to feel like they write themselves, and that’s pretty cool.
Back to the article, for one last time:
Let’s bring it back. Do you remember how I defined “horror” in my pseudo-definition above?
Horror is an effect that destabilizes and/or defamiliarizes the status quo with an active threat of harm.
As we discussed above, the blank pages “destabilizes and/or defamiliarizes the status quo” of our busy worlds full of something with its vast spread of nothing. So that’s the first element down, but what about the second? What is the “active threat of harm” of the blank page?
And it is here we see that the threat itself – the horror itself – does not come from the blank page alone, but from the first steps to writing.
The first threat of harm is to the concept of your story / article / manifesto. When the piece only exists in your head, then it cannot be faulted. It cannot fail. It exists in abstract perfection, but the blank page demands that something be written and, once the writing begins, the chance of failure begins.
But so what? So what if the idea of your perfect piece is threatened or even destroyed in the execution? An imperfect draft is infinitely better than perfect and unwritten idea, so we must overcome the resistance and begin! In fact, it is the ones we most resist that we must write (maybe using some of the techniques above?):
“Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
However, even if reach the point where no longer fear the harm to our concept, there is one more threat. One deeper and more devious threat, which I believe stops most would-be-writers in their tracks and even keeps a lot of us from doing as much as we’d like.
And that second threat of harm is to the author’s conception of myself – err, themself. I put it to you, constant reader who has come so far with me, that the idea of oneself as a writer is like the idea of a story. It can exist in abstract, platonic perfection so long as the page remains blank and we can float in an analgesic stasis. But to fail at the story is to fail as a writer, or so it seems.
Roberto Bolaño describes the fear of a writer thusly:
“That is, it was the great fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing … an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all fear of being no good…. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666
That is the horror inherent in the blank page, then: The threat of harm to our concepts of stories and, by extension, the harm to our concepts of ourselves as writers. The blank page destabilizes the world of something not just by presenting a space of nothing but by demanding that we as writers fill it. Line by line, the expanse ahead challenges us. And because we take our task seriously, we feel the threat that to do it badly / boringly / wrong will make us less than.
But here’s the last trick—that threat to your identity as “writer” isn’t real. Just by writing, we are writers. By finding joy in the process, we cannot do it wrong. Not only that, we can always edit and revise and just write more. Each blank page holds fear but also limitless potential for us to wrestle into the shape of our dreams. And in the end, no one needs to know that we ever feared or trembled before the horror of the blank page … because to the reader, it will never be blank.
But maybe you disagree? Or maybe you think my definition or my exploration is too narrow? Fortunately for you, I have run out of my allotted words. I’ve also almost run out of enough examples or exercises to keep up this structure.
Which brings me around to the final tactic: constraint. If the threat of the empty page is horrific, sometimes it’s because of the near endless possibilities. If you have one idea, one sentence, one voice, then sometimes the freedom of what could come next is too much. Too daunting.
In that case, I recommend you embrace constraints. Word counts; prompts or open calls; styles you want to explore; POVs / structures / techniques you want to try. Pick an odd form or a hidden spine that only you will know. If you need multiple ones, pick multiple ones. Heck, I tried to write an article about a blank page and based it off a heretofore unrelated definition of “horror” that nobody but me uses—that’s a pretty serious constraint!
Because the idea is to take that boundless freedom and compress it / narrow it / focus it. Like putting your thumb over the end of the garden hose, the soft gush of ideas becomes a jet stream when its given limitations (not full blockages, though).
Constraints turn your single idea into a tool to solve a specific problem. It can no longer be anything, but it will be something.
Something that can triumph over the horror inherent in the blank page.
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