Blankety Blank

Part One (hopefully…)

Here’s my problem – whenever I sit down to write, my mind goes blank. It’s as if I forget all the words I’ve ever learned and instead my head is filled with empty space. Staring at a blank page is somewhat like peering out of a plane when you know you’re about to parachute to the ground below. Well, I imagine. Not having a death wish, I haven’t thrown myself out of a plane as of yet. Although, 2011 could be the year.

It wont be.

It hasn’t always been like this, though. Once upon a time (when phrases like ‘once upon a time’ were used not at all ironically in many of the children’s books I read) there was no shutting me up. I was the kid in the class who, despite being asked to write a 3-side story about a shed, would happily churn out 30 fantasy-filled pages about a talking rat who lived in that shed and needed help because he couldn’t feed the many, many offspring he had offsprung. My poor teachers spent hours reading these stories, until they finally told me that they’d just “take my word for it”. At some point, even I got fed up of the constant work myself and my mind shut down. Maybe I hadn’t organised a good enough Union for my brain (or perhaps that was the problem – it was TOO good… bloody politics), but for one reason or another it just stopped.

Now, I find sitting down to try and get back in the swing of things a battle, chiefly with my own nitpicking mind. These days, I really am my own worst critic; interminably convinced that whatever is making it onto the page is, frankly, rubbish. If I don’t think I’m making a brilliant, incisive point, or the little joke I’ve squeezed in is anything less than hilarious, I scrap the project and retreat into the bunker of procrastination. As this is the vast majority of what I write when I eventually do manage to put pen to paper (or finger to key), I don’t get much done. What’s worse is that my procrastination sanctuary often takes the form of reading or watching something much better than whatever I just discarded. You can imagine just how much of a boon that is to someone like me…

(While I struggle for ideas, I’m never short of sarcasm.)

It’s a good thing that I’m not destined to write a future classic, really. I mean, if Dickens had been anything like me, he would’ve got as far as ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ and thought “Hmmm, that sums it up really. Sort of negates the point of the rest of the narrative plot. Bugger”. A Tale of Two Cities would’ve been less of an historic novel and more of a half-finished haiku.
Granted, this actually might’ve come in quite handy had Dan Brown suffered from my ailment. It may have prevented people thinking the bloody Da Vinci Code was real anyway…

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