Beware The Blank Page

The writer's greatest enemy: the blank page.  Scarier than you think. For all those who think writing is trivial, think again. It is anything but. It is serious, deep and dangerous. Real writing that excavates the bones of who we really are. It is dark psychological terrain. 

No one can explain this better than prolific Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. She is one of my favourite writers for her sense of unflinching truth. Her writing goes straight to the gut, and stays there. She is fearless and fearsome in tackling dark matter. Who can forget the dystopian nightmare of The Handmaid's Tale or the disturbing insights offered in Alias Grace? All of Atwood's fiction indeed, cuts to the bone. 

I was especially stunned and haunted after reading her take on  the blank page, or the page, as she puts it. This is writing as dangerous, writing as diving into deep matter, writing as a compulsion and a sacrifice. 

I just have to copy it here for you to read and become aware of, if you aren't already. And if you haven't happened upon her essays and short fiction, start!  This extract, 'The Page' comes from the short collection 'Murder in the Dark' which features other short essays and prose poems.

'The Page' - Margaret Atwood

1. The page waits, pretending to be blank. Is that its appeal, its blankness? What else is this smooth and white, this terrifyingly innocent?  A snowfall, a glacier? It's a desert, totally arid, without life. But people venture into such places. Why? To see how much they can endure, how much dry light?

2.  I've said the page is white, and it is: white as wedding dresses, rare whales, seagulls, angels, ice, and death. Some say that like sunlight it contains all colours; others, that it's white because it's hot, it will burn out your optic nerves; that those who stare at the page too long go blind.

3. The page itself has no dimensions and no directions. There's no up or down except what you yourself mark, there's no thickness and weight bu those you put there, north and south do not exist unless you're certain of them. The page is without vistas and without sounds, without centres or edges. Because of this you can become lost in it forever. Have you never seen the look of gratitude, the look of joy, on the faces of those who have managed to return from the page? Despite their faintness, their loss of blood, they fall on their knees, they push their hands into the earth, they clasp the bodies of those they love, or, in a pinch, any bodies they can get, with an urgency unknown to those who have never experienced the full horror of a journey into the page. 

4. If you decide  to enter the page, take a knife and some matches, and something that will float. Take something you can hold onto, and a prism to split the light and a talisman that works, which should be hung on a chain around your neck: that's for getting back. It doesn't matter what kind of shoes, but your hands should be bare. You should never go into the page with gloves on. Such decisions, needless to say, should not be made lightly. 

    There are those, of course, who enter the page without deciding, without meaning to. Some of these have charmed lives and no difficulty, but most never make it out at all. For them, the page appears as a well, a lovely pool in which they catch sight of a face, their own but better. These unfortunates do not jump: rather they fall and the page closes over their heads without a sound, without a seam, and is immediately as whole and empty, as glassy, as enticing as before. 

5. The question about the page is: what is beneath it? It seems to have only two dimensions, you can pick it up and turn it over and the back is the same as the front. Nothing, you say, disappointed. 

    But you were looking in the wrong place, you were looking on the back instead of beneath. Beneath the page is another story. Beneath the page is a story. Beneath the page is everything that has ever happened, most of which you would rather not hear about. 

     The page is not a pool but a skin, a skin is there to hold in and it can feel you touching it. Did you really think it would just lie there and do nothing?

   Touch the page at your peril: it is you who are blank and innocent, not the page. Nevertheless you want to know, nothing will stop you. You touch the page, it's as if you've drawn a knife across it, the page has been hurt now, a sinuous wound opens, a thin incision. Darkness wells through. 

(*From  'Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems' © Margaret Atwood Virago UK 1994)

Indeed.  All of this rings true and through me. How about you? 

Dangerous, yes. But exhilarating too. Like climbing your own veritable Everest. All those metaphors of whiteness. The page is definitely somewhere you can lost, but also where you can be found. If you're brave enough of course, to ditch the gloves and the safety measures, and dive in there, whole-heartedly.

~ Siobhán

Why I Write - Writers (and Me) on Writing

This blog has been a long time coming. Why? Because it's important.  And here it is: Why do I write? Why do you write? Why do writers write exactly?

Is it to make a living - albeit a very random and penniless one? To provide a public podium for our frolicking imaginations? Because we're wordy and want somewhere to indulge our verbal acrobatics? To dictate to the masses? On a notion, a whim, a wish? To make ourselves heard? To have the last word?

Writing is not just a pastime, a hobby, or indeed a career. It's a passion. A pursuit against all odds of ordinary. Not the shallow stereotype of  scribbling and doodling and making up stories to entertain, it's more about engaging with the world, responding to it and creating. It's not trivial, it's powerful. 

 

It's hard to explain - exactly. There's a lot to it. I've tried to explain it to people and I can never seem to get across how important, essential it is. Most writers, serious writers, would say that they feel they have to write, that it's an inner essential need, as necessary as breathing. 

Granted, there are 'writers' who engage in the art of the pen for entertainment sake only. Those who engage in writing from time-to-time, a hobby. And on an echoing note, there seems to be a stereotypical consensus out there that writing is something you take up  only when older, as retirement recreation, like knitting. (I say this as it seems every writing group I've ever attended has been populated mainly with older members.) But why? Some of the greatest writers have been and are young writers. Those who have been passionate about the craft since they first put pen to paper in single digits. Today young writers are clearing the score-board - Zadie Smith for example and this year's mid-twenties Orange prize winner, Tea Obreht (and Cecelia Ahern, dare I say it, one of the wealthiest and youngest writers around, regardless of her chick-lit status). Wilfred Owen was only in  his early twenties when he wrote what is today considered some of the greatest war poetry ever.  Keats left a legacy behind him after his death at twenty-five. Seamus Heaney was peddling verses at school, as were the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen when she was just a young woman on the threshold of adulthood... Need I go on?

Anyway, back to topic - Why do I write? Not as a hobby. I have enough other hobbies. Reading is a hobby. But writing is not. Writing is more important than a hobby, more demanding, more purposeful. Writing is the career I'm chasing, but more than that too, it's also a fulfillment of a kind, of every kind. A fire that I've lit and tended to and if I let go out, I'll turn to ashes and embers in its wake. It's a need, a devotion, above all else.

And why do writers write? Margaret Atwood, one of my favourite writers is someone who has managed to express this 'need' for writing. She has been writing since her youth, as most great writers have been. In her book on writing  'Negotiating With the Dead', she examines the whole business of writing, the whys and whats and hows on a psychological level, and one memorable passage where she pieces together all the reasons for writing she has ever heard from writers of all shapes and sizes goes as follows:
 
'To record the world as it is. To set  down the past before it is all forgotten. To excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To satisfy my desire for revenge. Because I knew I had to keep writing or else I would die. Because to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know we are alive. To produce order out of chaos. To delight and instruct (not often found after the twentieth century, or not in that form.) To please myself. To express myself. To express myself beautifully. To create a perfect work of art. To reward the virtuous and punish the guilty; or - the Marquis de Sade defense, used by ironists - vice versa. To hold a mirror up to Nature. To hold a mirror up to the reader. To paint a portrait of society and its ills. To express the unexpressed life of the masses. To name the hitherto unnamed. To defend the human spirit, and human integrity and honor. To thumb my nose at Death. To make money so my children could have shoes. To make money so I could sneer at those who formerly sneered at me. To show the bastards. Because to create is human. Because to create is Godlike. Because I hated the idea of having a job. To say a new word. To make a new thing. To create a national consciousness, or a national conscience. To justify my failures in school. To justify my own view of myself and my life, because I couldn't be a 'writer' unless I actually did some writing. To make myself appear more interesting than I actually was. To attract the love of a beautiful woman. To attract the love of any woman at all. To attract the love of a beautiful man. To rectify the imperfections of my miserable childhood. To thwart my parents. To spin a fascinating tale. To amuse and please the reader. To amuse and please myself. To pass the time, even though it would have passed anyway. Graphomania. Compulsive logorrhea. Because I was driven to it by some force outside of my control.  Because I was possessed. Because an angel dictated to me. Because I fell into the embrace of the muse. Because I got pregnant by the Muse and needed to give birth to a book (an interesting piece of cross-dressing, indulged in by male writers of the seventeenth century). To serve Art. To serve the Collective Unconscious. To serve History. To justify the ways of God towards man. To act out antisocial behaviour for which I would have been punished in real life. To master a craft so I could generate texts (a recent entry). To subvert the Establishment. To demonstrate that whatever is, is right. To experiment with new forms of perception. To create a recreational boudoir so the reader could go into it and have fun (translated from a Czech newspaper). Because the story took hold of me and wouldn't let me go (the Ancient Mariner defense). To search for understanding of the reader and myself. To cope with my depression. For my children. To make a name that would survive death. To defend a minority group or oppressed class. To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. To epose appalling wrongs or atrocities. To record the times through which I have lived. To bear witness to horrifying events I have survived. To speak for the dead. To celebrate life in all its complexity. To praise the universe. To allow for the possibility of hope and redemption. To give back something of what has been given to me. '


Phew! That's a mighty long list, but no doubt an accurate one, of both lowly and lofty reasons. Margaret Atwood herself, leans to the idea of writing as a way of lighting up the 'darkness.' She also notes the example of Samuel Beckett, who famously said that writing was all he was good for. And Flaubert, who said that you will always write the greatest for yourself, and not any audience.

Hmmm. So many different reasons, seemingly correlating to the literature status sought,  those with lowly ideals and those with lofty ones. Me? I write on an impulse, and electrifying urge.  Like Lord Byron, to clear all the clutter out of my head and onto the page where it becomes legible (lest I go mad in its cerebral  crowding and in-squabbling).  To define things: the world, states of emotion, truths, myself. 'To give to airy nothing a local habitation.'  Because I'm head-over-heels in love with language. Because I'd like to spend every spare moment  I have tinkering at the treasure of words and nothing else. Because it's a fire that needs to be fed. Because writing makes things matter.

Why do we write? As Rilke put so beautifully, in every serious wannabe-writer's handbook - 'Letters to a Young Poet - 'This above all - ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple 'I must', then build your life according to this necessity...'

And the answer is a resounding YES - for those of us who are serious about writing.  The lofty ones, the committed ones, the do-or-die ones. The ones who may have it tougher, struggle to make a writerly living, whose futures consist of garrets and solitary scribbling, who go to writer-groups for literary criticism not tea and chit-chat, who  painstakingly ponder on the meaning and magic of manuscripts, rather then churning out lite, bright, by the bundle bestsellers.  Oh well, we have the deep soul solace of words, where they merely skim the surface.

(Maybe I've left out some quotable writers on this million-dollar question, have I? Anyone out there able to quote some more?) Or better yet, add some new reasons to this treatise I've set out??  And you fellow lofty writers out there - share your aspirations! Now that I've laid down my gramophone, I'm all ears as always...


wondering and pondering and writing on,


~ Siobhán.