Emma Halverson
The Fear of the Blank Page
If you want to nurture your creative writing skills, simply getting started can be tough. The fear of the blank page comes for many of us! Even professional writers fight to wrangle their inner critic. Laini Taylor, the author of the bestselling young adult novels Smoke & Bone and Strange the Dreamer, has written openly on her blog about her struggles with writer’s block, procrastination, and self-doubt.
To overcome her fear of the blank page, Laini Taylor invented a freewriting exercise called an “attic notebook.” If you want to get more comfortable writing creatively, give an attic notebook a try!
What is an Attic Notebook?
In Tayor’s words, an attic notebook is:
an ongoing writing exercise in which you commit to filling up a notebook in short, regular sessions without looking back to read what you wrote until after it’s full + one month. That is, you only move forward, never peeking backward, and once you reach the last page, you close it, put the date on the cover and set it aside, only to be opened after a month has gone by.
My experience has been that when I finally get to read it, I remember almost none of it and it feels like finding a weird notebook in an attic, full of glittering fragments of stories, poems, ideas, imagery. Hence the name: “attic notebook.”
Essentially, an attic notebook is a judgement-free zone: a place to experiment and make mistakes without worrying about structure or quality. Only once you finish the notebook do you allow yourself to plumb its depths for inspiration.
No single writing exercise will work for everyone, but sometimes giving yourself space to write without judgement can help you become more comfortable putting words on a page. To borrow from Tayor again:
Since you’re not allowed to read what you wrote, you can’t judge it, so you can’t get discouraged. You turn the page and move on. The further you get into the notebook, the more those early pages turn to mysteries, and the quieter the inner critic becomes. Eventually, in fact, your inner critic will just abandon the space altogether because it has nothing to do! It will wither and retreat. [...] Overall, process will be allowed to outweigh outcome, enabling a nimbler, looser creative mindset.
Set aside ten or fifteen minutes each day to write in your attic notebook, and you may be surprised by how quickly the pages fill up—and how freely the words flow.
Image Credit: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
