The end of the year offers conscientious writers the opportunity to evaluate their year-long assault against the tyranny of the blank page. Such a self-assessment can be defined any number of ways. A simple page count is one of them..But is mass productivity the proper measure of a professional writer? Or should it be quality? If the latter, how should such quality be measured?
Sportswriter Red Smith famously declared writing was easy. All one needed to do: sit down at a typewriter and “open a vein.” Given writing’s inherent difficulties and our current cultural and political turmoil, it surprises no one that writers seek a protectiveing force or idea, a champion, to mitifate the stress of filling the blank page.
Tyranny of the Blank Page: Backstory
The genesis of this concern comes from a writers’ discussion on Reddit. One of its more inflammatory headline declares “The number 1 rule of writing: Nobody wants to read your work; you have to make them want it.” Like many such online discussions, none of the commenters offered a good or even novel suggestion how to make readers want to do so (Those who possessed such a secret were using it to promote their own work). However, in keeping with the tone of the headline, some proved quite frank about the difficulties they encountered trying to reach an audience.
Beyond the customary shibboleths of knowing one’s audience or making sure your writing the best it can be, one suggested that writing for fame and fortune was an illusion. Measuring success by the number of books sold is a quantative mistake. The actual financial winners are the publshers and printers who have supplied the authors with their inventory. For every one in a million author like J. K. Rowling or Neil Gaiman, there are 999,999 others whose work never sells and probably never will. What little comfort these folks have lies in the group solace in anthropologit Margaret Mead‘s snide reassurance, “Always remember you arte absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”
Tyranny of the Blank Page: Self-Evaluation
Appreciating the Reddit folks’ candor still left the question of what to do. Should it be a long, hard look at my work over the past year? What about the years preceding it? Should they be included as well? Moreover, should writing be abandoned entirely? If so, what avocaation replaces it?
Fortunately, my wife emailed me such an assessment titled “20 Questions to Ignite Your Best Year.” Similar to several of my writing lists, such as “Fast Writing: Ten-Step Process,” this assessment was thorough and particular. It identified ten questions regarding the past year and another ten anticipating what to strive for in the following year. The most crucial for this discussion involved the initial two regarding the past year: What stands out as your most cherished moment of the past year? and Which accomplishment are you most proud ot?
Distinguishing between a most-cherished moment and an accomplishment necessarily implies a distinction between an emotive event and an achievement. They are not one and the same. If they are, it suggests one’s sense of fulfillment lies in the abstract, in material things rather than in the emotive or socially interactive. The remaining questions built upon this subtle distinction as it applied to past actions and how this set of values applies to future endeavors.
Tyranny of the Blank Page: Personal Application
The questions raised were existential. Should I quit? Or should I continue writing? The relative paucity of my book sales, particularly after Covid, provided plenty of material reason not to continue. On the other hand, my most cherished moments occurred while expressing a thought or emotion exactly as intended. Doing so provided a frisson of satisfaction, an “Amen” moment of truth experienced nowhere else. Moreover, having readers compliment those narrative points embellishes that feeling of certainty in a thought well-expressed. In those moments giving up writing seems as impossible as preventing Picasso from transforming a discarded bicycle seat and handle bars into a bull’s head and horns.
What To Do?
Given this insidght, my choices became clear. In the past, my writing existed in the mystery/thriller genre. Back then, mystery writer Raymond Chandlers advice served as my touchstone in this regard. Chandler wrote of his detective, Philip Marlowe, “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. . . . .the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” Nevertheless, enthralling as Philip Marlowe’s investigations are, they presuppose an answer for everything. The hero always deduces the right solution. On the whole, right triumphs, if only for a little while.
In the decades since, people learned human deduction is not infallible. In fact, some situations lie beyond human reasoning. Consequently, writers’ options multiply. Do they resort to a higher power? Engage in cynicism and dystopias? Or escape into art like William Butler Yeats or Andre Malraux?
Those artists and authors are orders of magnitude above me. Yet, it also seems to me that putting my writing out there to sink or swim on its merits is the best way to deal with present-day culture and society.
In addition, it also might be OK to imbue my hopes and dreams for the future in the two champions that appear to the right of this paragraph. With Zaraoar (Pokemon) and Darth Vader (Star Wars) having my back, current events don’t seem nearly as bleak.
What do you think? Tell me in the Leave a Reply section below.