Type / Writing

Thoughts on blank pages, tyranny thereof

It’s been a week, and it’s raining. Life’s full at the moment, in good ways mostly, full of family, friends, projects. But that very fullness makes me keenly aware of distraction: when every fifteen minutes counts, it feels devastating to waste half an hour. (It’s not, of course, devastating, or even really waste: that old scarcity mindset nesting in your brain.) It’s odd that we so often work, now, in the middle of a giant casino that doubles as the venue for a grudgy town meeting, and also is on fire.

But that’s not where I’ve done most of my writing this week. I’m writing new scenes for this revision pass on a typewriter we found in my grandfather’s house, which has been a great help and posed a particular challenge—the help bound up in the nature of the challenge. The typewriter, you see, types. This is an electric model, a Coronamatic 2500 that whirrs ominously when idle. Each keystroke produces a high-speed flickering blow, a slam into the paper. It is a machine in physical space—carriage returns knock over teacups. And every character you type, endures. You can feel the letter shapes on the paper with your fingertips. You can’t ‘just go back’ and add a necessary sentence. You can’t insert a word, or delete one (though you can make do with a row of x’s). Every act, intentional or not, is hammered into physical reality.

Moving from this to a word processor must have felt like a revelation. (I hazily remember how hard it was to type up clean copies of grade school projects on my parents’ manual.) But moving “backward” has its wonders, too. This forty-year-old machine functions perfectly. The ribbon cartridge, which sat in the machine in its case in a New England garage for ten years at least, untended, yielded about twenty dry keystrokes, then clear black like-new type. No bit-rot here.

But it’s the effect on the writing process that’s fascinated me, how that permanence, the irrevocability of each stroke, intersects with the “tyranny of the blank page.”

It’s common to identify the feeling of resistance many writers encounter at one time or another when faced with the blank page as, basically, a form of perfectionism. Writers are often told, and often remind one another, to “give ourselves permission to suck,” to “write the bad version” or “write shitty first drafts.” I would expect, if that were all that was going on, that working on a machine where it’s hard to correct myself would make the resistance much worse.

That hasn’t been the case. It has, rather, made the resistance better. Not less—it feels like walking into a stiff wind. I pause, consider, take care. I am keenly aware of the texture of each sentence. Sometimes paragraphs flow, and sometimes I lift my fingers from the keys to consider angles of assault. What I write has weight—not the weight of mountains, but the weight of a good pack on one’s back on a hike through the mountains—conscious of path choice, foot placement, shifting weight, of my own alertness, of the support of the walking stick.

Blankness—particularly the blankness of the screen—presents the challenge of perfectionism, yes but it presents a matched challenge of irrelevance. Any choice made on screen can be unmade far more easily. You have written a sentence. So what? A keystroke removes it from reality, without erasermarks or a crossed-out line. Why not write another sentence, another scene? Another book? Why not do something else, anyway? What does it mean to commit—to a scene, a line, a phrase, a character, a vision or a philosophy or a project or even a self—in the world of the delete key? Let alone in the Alt-Tab world, always a key-chord away from some sign that you’ve chosen the wrong tactic, the wrong pressing concern, the wrong angle or the wrong form. How silly it seems to commit.

Blankness, I think— the blank page, the blank slide, the silence that births music—is to any serious work as the angel to Jacob: a wrestling partner, a danger, a moment of contact with what lies beyond. It issues a challenge. That challenge may terrify, but it can also be good. Powerful, affirming, meaningful. If, in the moment, it overwhelms: yes, give yourself permission to suck, to write the bad version, to make a mark on the page out of sheer goofy defiance, to screw around and play and see what comes. But also: give your work permission to matter. Let it daunt you, and contend anyway. Make choices and commit to them. Tilt at windmills.

And now, for me: back to work. Have a good weekend, friends. Happy writing, and happy reading.