In almost every movie or show featuring writers, you’ll see it—that one scene with the awkward pause as their fingers hover over the keyboard. A cursor ominously blinks onscreen, its on-and-off motion magnifying the intense whiteness of the blank page. The writer pauses, thinking hard about what exactly they want to write. Every flicker seems to taunt the writer:
C’mon what are you doing? Fill me up! I’m right here!
But it is this very blank page that terrifies the writer. It shocks them into noncompliance. It turns their brain into so much mush that even thinking of the next words lies beyond their capabilities.
The problem here is manifold. A number of obstacles lie in the writer’s way:
- What to write? There are so many ideas out there in the world, but a number of prompts online can help to stir the creative pot.
- How to write it? Which genre? Which words to use?
- What if it isn’t perfect?
The last one—the writer’s expectations—spoils everything. Writers believe they have to fill the page with perfect, beautiful prose that reads like a charm, makes perfect fictive sense, all while arousing the purest of emotions in the reader. Somewhere deep in their hearts, they know this expectation is flawed. Anne Lammott didn’t label it “Shitty First Drafts” for no reason. But invariably, writers expect to fill the blank page with the perfect title, followed by the perfect opening, middle, and ending.
My solution to this problem: Don’t start writing in a blank document.
On my desktop resides a Word document titled “Writing Practice.” Into this document, I pour in all kinds of drivel. It is not a diary, but rather a testing ground for words, sentences, paragraphs that I can enlarge upon at a later date.
Whenever a story idea strikes me, I begin on a new line, separating it from the previous crud with a simple “—.” This tricks the mind and the eye into thinking that we’re continuing an old existing piece. We’re not writing something new, so no expectations, and no sweat.
When I have completed close to five hundred words and still have more to write, or even when I’ve grown comfortable with what I have written so far, I slap on the new stuff into a separate word document, conjure up a tentative title, and save it. Then I continue in that new document. The very act of copy-pasting it is freeing—it feels not like I’ve just started something new, but rather that I’m on the verge of finishing it.
If I don’t like what I’ve written, I simply leave it there and move on.
What are the advantages of this method? Glad you asked—there are a few:
- No perfect title needed
When I used to start writing in a brand-new blank document, the intense desire to place a perfect title at the top of the document overwhelmed me. It paralyzed me even before I began. But now with a practice document, I don’t need a perfect title for either the piece or the file name itself. This is writing practice, remember? What do I need a title for? I can figure out one when I get to it later. Mostly, a good title comes to me after I’ve actually finished writing a first draft, and fleshed out the meat of the story.
- Freewriting
This one step of creating a practice document helped me more with freewriting than anything else. Even my attempts at timed writing improved, as the burden expectations of churning out perfect prose were lifted from my shoulders. Finally, I could reap the full benefits of the Pomodoro Technique.
- Testing ground
If you start writing and find that you have covered the meat of the subject in just about a hundred words, it is likely that you don’t have sufficient matter to turn this into a full essay or story. But it does mean you can turn it into a piece of micro fiction. So, you just don’t copy it into a new document, but you can always refer to it later, so that you can slice out a neat sentence or pretty phrase and slap it onto a new more deserving piece.
Like all writing hacks, this works when you let it work for you. If you have a prompt or a topic ready, but the blank page terrifies you beyond belief, try this out. I have been doing this for the last few years and the results vouch for themselves. In addition to having fifty stories published over the last five years, I have also achieved my target of writing more than fifty thousand words per year.
Take a shot, and let me know if it works for you!
Gargi Mehra is a writer, a computer engineer, and a mother. She plays the piano and thrives on word games including crosswords, Scrabble and Wordle. Her creative writing has appeared in several literary magazines online and in print. She lives with her husband and two children in Pune, India.
