Pet Hate: The Misery of The Blank Page.
Pet hate - the blank page: There are at least two angles from which to view the blank page. View 1: It's a clean sheet, physically and metaphorically, and the possibilities of which words to put on it are endless. Well, not quite endless, unless one makes up words, like Shakespeare. Apparently 'The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use (and 47,156 obsolete words).' View 2: It's depressing. There's nothing there!
Some writers have a story planned out in their heads, or plotted in hundred of pieces of paper, before writing down one word. Whole novels were constructed inside Agatha Christie's head whilst washing up.
A famous writer described searching for a story, as a bit like being an archaeologist, scraping painstakingly away at the sand, until a shape of something reveals itself.
I'm presently having a dreary time scraping the sand. Scrape, scrap, delete, scrape, scrap, crap, scrape, version 2, back to version 1, scrape. Should this come before this, or that before that? Cut and paste. Scrape. What next? Oh the misery of the blank page!
Shakespeare by the way is credited with inventing 1,700 words.
Some writers have a story planned out in their heads, or plotted in hundred of pieces of paper, before writing down one word. Whole novels were constructed inside Agatha Christie's head whilst washing up.
A famous writer described searching for a story, as a bit like being an archaeologist, scraping painstakingly away at the sand, until a shape of something reveals itself.
I'm presently having a dreary time scraping the sand. Scrape, scrap, delete, scrape, scrap, crap, scrape, version 2, back to version 1, scrape. Should this come before this, or that before that? Cut and paste. Scrape. What next? Oh the misery of the blank page!
Shakespeare by the way is credited with inventing 1,700 words.
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