The Cold Blank Page

Sometimes it is easier to dive straight into the icy coldness of the blank page, and with a few quick strokes, swim a whole stream of words across the page, leaving it churning, disturbed in your wake.

Other times, though, you want to slip into the cold blank page, slowly and carefully, shivering as its cold blankness takes you within it. Times when you can only take a few hesitant strokes, when a mere handful of tentative words are left floating, bobbing on the uncertainty of what you wanted to say.

Here, though, it is safe to swim your words down onto the page. There are no shark shadows lurking under the surface, no monsters of the prose hidden deep below, their long sinewy tentacles reaching out to drag you down into the silence. There are no great ocean liners steaming oblivious towards you and no icebergs brooding closer.

Here it is just a small swimming pool where you can lay down sentence after sentence across the calm water, letting each stroke leave some thought bobbing gently in its wake.

Then when you feel you have done enough for the day, feel as though the exercise has purged the stiffness from your word muscles you can pull yourself up out of the word water, pick up your towel and dry yourself. All the while, promising that you will return the following day with a feeling that, yes, the exercise is doing you good.