UNILEB

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

- Vladimir Nabokov -

It seems to me that it is quite an impossible feat for a writer to face their fears and face the foe that is the white blank page. I know I have been guilty of this countless times.

I never know when this fear will show its face but when it does I suffer to my core. 
I cannot remember the last time this fear of the white page, which I shall name now as “Blankophobia: fear of a blank page”, hit me last.

I do know however that I am currently suffering from it. I don’t know whether it is because of the current stress that I am dealing with in my life or because at the moment my inner writer wants a fucking hiatus - but I am definitely suffering from a bad case of Blankophobia. 

The bigger problem is that I wish I actually had a solution to this. 
I don’t. 

I teach writing courses, I am a writer and I don’t have a solution for this problem. 

Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe no one should. Because, and call me unorthodox, we need it. Maybe we need this fear. Sometimes fearing the white page is exactly what we need to give ourselves a break…a breather…a mini-cation from the hard and difficult task of writing. 

I believe that eventually that same fear will transform and become our motivation. 

The more I write, the more I lose my motivation to write… I get to the point where I feel drained and empty from within. My characters suffer for it, my ideas suffer for it, the fluidity of my writing suffers for it. So personally, I would rather fear the blank page for a bit then return fully ready to fight for those whom I left behind. 

But maybe I am just trying to cheer myself on and say it’s alright to be afraid. Maybe I am wrong and maybe we should find a way to overcome said fear and not give into it. 

The point of all this is, I am stuck. I have reached this point of feeling stuck and I am confessing it to you, my readers. I am not ashamed of it. I am human after all. I am a writer and we all go through it. This is why I decided to confess this to you, so that the next time I tell you I know what you are going through, you know that I am speaking the truth. 

I am here now, and I have been here before.

I will do what I can to over come this or maybe just give into it and see what occurs on the other side. 

Till then, I bid you all adieu. 
Keep Writing.