Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Overcoming The Writer’s Blank Page

Overcoming The Writer’s Blank Page

Don’t be scared of the blank page.

Why?

Because if you are a writer, facing it daily is what you signed up for.

In fact, daily tackling the blank page is all that the job of a writer really is – for the quality of output is mostly subjective.

Steven Pressfield called fighting against the blank page “Resistance.”

My advice is to just start.

Don’t be devastated though if you give up on writing eventually, most people do, after all.

Even Hitler couldn’t be an artist.

Plus there are a million other things you can do with your life.

I mean, business school will gladly welcome you back home.

When we greet it, we are quite rightly filled with trepidation. What are you? we wonder. What will you yield to us? The page gazes impassively back. It will give us nothing. It will take everything. It isn’t interested in how we think or what we feel. It doesn’t care if we fill it with words, or if we crumple it up in despair.

-Dani Shapiro, Still Writing

Impossible Task

Impossible Task

If you are facing an impossible task?

If so, your initial reaction might be telling.

Is your first response doubt?

Maybe defiance?

Or do you shrug and give up?

I love the story of Bob Goff’s persistence after being told he was denied admission to law school.

Did he quietly move on and apply for business school?

Nope.

He sat outside the dean’s office for a week until he got the answer he wanted.

I mean, who gets to decide what’s impossible and what’s achievable anyway?

I don’t know about you, but I want people to think twice before they tell me something is impossible.

How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it. This choice defines us. Puts us at a crossroads with ourselves and what we think about the kind of person we are. “Anyone who is threatened and is forced by necessity either to act or to suffer,” writes Machiavelli, “becomes a very dangerous man to the prince.”

-Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy

Sterling Terrell