I’d say my favorite kind of cheese is
mozerella, but really, I’d like to talk about blank page syndrome.
This is a syndrome that effects everyone,
or at least, everyone ever who has ever had to write something. It doesn’t
matter if it’s a script, or a musical score, or a painting canvas, or a plain
grey wall, everyone suffers from blank page syndrome. Starting something is
never easy, especially when it involves being creative, because being creative
means drawing on something from within yourself. As such, when people look it,
sure they are looking at a book/film/painting/musical score, but what they are
actually looking at is a little piece of you. It doesn’t matter how much you
hated it, or love it, it is you that is on display. And this thought,
naturally, stumps some people. How do you know that what you’re expressing in
that particular moment, is even a little, tiny bit good.
Short answer, you don’t. That’s why people
enjoy working in groups, instant responses to your ideas.
That’s why whenever you get to a new page,
you often have a long pause. Even if you were on a blazing trail for the
previous page, and you were right in a stroke of inspiration, you suddenly feel
reflective of the page, blank. It’s happened to me all the time, and no doubt
it’s happened to both of you, Andrew & R. A..
Of course, it doesn’t happen all the time.
Usually, when you’ve planned out whatever you’re working on beforehand, you can
push past it quite quickly. And actually tricking yourself by just pushing
stuff from a previous onto the next page, and then continuing from there can
work very well.
But I know what you’re all asking, what
does this have to do with Mozerella cheese.
Well I’m glad you asked, strange other me…
Mozerella is a cheese that, when you start,
you don’t really know what to do with. It’s a bit like a blank page, it has the
potential to achieve greater things that cheeses like cheddar or
Craft-Plastic-Wrapped-Cheese-Impersonator, but you can’t see it. Even if you
were at the end of a trail blazing cooking session filled with steamed
vegetables, and cup-brownies (delicious by the way) and pasta (a healthy kind)
you’ll suddenly get to Mozerella and be at a blank. Do you sprinkle it on your
vegetables, or find some bizarre and probably not tasty way of integrating it
with your brownies, or do you mix into a cheese sauce and mix that into your
pasta? So many options, each just as valid as the next (well, expect the
brownies thing) and you’re up to a blank.
But here’s how you get out of it.
Change how your mind is approaching the
topic. When we look at a blank page, we think big. There is a whole blank page
in front of us, and we need to immediately fill the whole thing with brilliant
invention that people will love. An entire page, just like that. Now, when you
phrase it like that, it sounds perfectly ridiculous to expect ourselves to fill
out an entire page the moment we start looking at it, but we’re not thinking
that way at the time.
What we’re thinking is that we have just
another small, insignificant page, part of something much bigger, and we are
just moving through it one small step at a time. So in our minds at the time, we
are just looking at one small page, so expecting us to take the whole thing on
at once is perfectly sensible. What we should be thinking, is much, much
smaller.
Start with a single line. A single string
of musical notes, a single string of words, and single bit of pencil outline. That’s
all you have to do. It doesn’t have to be any good, but you’re not making a
masterpiece of this page all at once, you have only to start. And what is the
most useful thing to start with, how annoyed you are that you suddenly have
nothing to write/draw/notate. Your own feelings are the best way to burst
through blank page syndrome, thinking and feeling the right way about it, and
suddenly, you’ll find that you’ll succeed in breaking it.
Just like cooking with mozerella, you’re
not making an entire meal of this cheese, you’re making one, maybe two small
things. So pick one (or two) small ways to use it, and suddenly it’s potential
to be a delicious cheese gets unlocked.
Daniel Lyons.
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