Few things have the same effect on me as a blank, white page. I truly despise the act of sitting down to write.
I am, at times, in love with words, and I usually don't mind at all being called upon to speak them. In truth I honestly don't even mind writing them, when there are previous words to build on. But the moment when I sit down at my desk with the intention of filling a page is… ugh. Like a farmer trying to milk a stubborn old cow, an ordeal for all parties involved. Blegh. I like to think I'm not a terrible writer, I prefer to think that I just can't stand being forced to write. A blank page irritates me in that silent nagging way, like a lingering awkward silence which makes one want to shriek, if only to break it. Yech.
Just say something, it doesn't even have to be a true or meaningful thing.
…
Maybe I am a bad writer, if I can't pluck good ideas from nothing and nowhere.
Or maybe, a more comforting thought, there is an entity woven into the essence of writing itself that despises me, and therefore curses me. I see it, how it taunts me. It's dancing and laughing, just a little bit behind my blank, white page.
…
I will start over.
This is a short snippet of a longer piece of creative writing I did for a literature class, and while the rest of this story did not have much to do with the topic of these paragraphs, I felt that writing out my very real frustrations (partially in character) actually helped me to get started with writing the damn story. It is always easier to write when there is something already on the page.
We all want the thing we spend time on creating to be great, but if we sit around waiting for it to finally start in the great way we know it can, it will probably never exist.
This website I have created harbors a lot of very different interests and projects of mine, but they are all connected by one thing: my personal critique. I decide what to work on, how my projects look, feel, and operate, and I decide what things to write about, how to write about them, and how much of myself to share with the world during that process.
Being critical, in art, in work, and in life, is important, obviously.
There are projects I have worked on that were such complete and total failures that I would never want to display them publicly. They are by no means worthless, they served as valuable lessons for me. You learn a lot more from failing than you do from succeeding. But at a certain point of failing upwards you have to put things in context and decide that the story must start, no matter how much better it could be. You have to commit and just go for it.
I can wait until I master everything to take note of my accomplishments, and all will see how great I am. Or I can accept that it'll never be the perfect time to start, and I will give myself the gift of capturing the journey as it unfolds.
I bought a notebook, which I now just refer to as "The Tome". It holds a lot of personal wisdom and knowledge that is very important to me, and the pages do not follow any set structure. Journal entries are interlaced with diagrams, drawings, mandalas, schedules, quotes, and strange collages which I can not even really describe.
When I got this notebook, I realized how important it was for me to feel free from any expectations while writing in it. It was a book that should grow with me, and I did not want to feel the book was "ruined" when years later I looked back at old pages and found my younger self's scribbles and musings to be outdated. I needed the book to start in a way that would give me "something", a mark on the blank page, without being so decisive that it could potentially invalidate some later idea.
I took some inspiration from the great Willem Dafoe, and I must say he really explains what I have been trying to get at quite well in this short clip. He presents the idea of "trying to fail", which all of a sudden allows one to explore all creative possibilities without the fear that what they choose will be "not good enough".
So, I filled the first page of my notebook with whatever came to my mind, no second guessing, no quality control. It became a collection of doodles, some funny, some serious, some detailed, some not. And then I wrote at the top of the page: "If the first page is awful, I won't hesitate to write in this book." And somehow that page which I tried my best to make a mess of, in order to free the rest of the book from any expectation, has become, for that reason, my favorite page. The rest of the book would not exist without it.
That is why I thought this would be a good way to start this blog, which I have been struggling to start for the better part of a year now. I wanted to make a post which is enough to get me going, without setting any expectations that will make me avoid writing further.
Everything that produces something of real value, be it the creative process, the engineering process, debugging a program, training an AI model, biological evolution: all of it happens through a series of course-correcting iterations. And it is impossible to iterate without taking the first step.