White Blank Page

I live in a house of writers. Even though Dom writes prose I’d still call him the poet out of the three of us – his room is full of anthologies and his computer whirs with lines of poetic rhythm. Joe writes poetry and prose – his two poems being published in this year’s anthology of Daps – along with Dom and myself – which is an anthology run by the students of the University of Glamorgan. (If you wanna buy a copy, just ask!) But anyway, there are three of us. I have written a few poems in my time, only two I’d call ‘OK’ and I’ve written them for my children’s folder which has yet to be reviewed.

But it all begins with a white blank page.

The three of us sit down with our pens or out fingers and stare at the blank page – the white blank page. Then we write it down. We let our imaginations pour in front of us, like an artist with his paints or a musician with his instrument. Our instruments are our minds and the house whirrs with writing.

I’ve got a few things on the go at the moment – re-drafting one completed, for want of a better word ‘novel’ and another uncompleted, children’s one, as well as a short story about domestic violence called Elephants In Rooms. The opening is as follows...

This time it was because she broke her favourite mug.

After cooking him dinner, fetching him a beer, doing the things he said wives were supposed to do, she started washing the dishes. She stood on feet that ached, scrubbed with hands that were sore and, through the soapy water, grabbed the mug. Then it slipped – like the bar of soap in the sleazy porn movies he made her watch. Then it flew through the air – like the faeces he threw at her when he was in his humiliating moods. And then it broke – just like her rib that time he found out she kept a diary. And when it smashed, the sound echoing around the house, he came into the kitchen and looked at her. She tried to stay strong, she tried to fight back but she crumbled with fear and did not yell because it was no use.

This is probably subject to change as it will more than likely be work-shopped in my fiction class but the idea is there, well, the opening anyway, the first major scene and then what next? I usually plan my stories – for the past couple of months I have been planning out Cupid’s Obsession in my head – because I hate not knowing everything. J.K. Rowling said that she loves it when she gets the impression the writer knows everything, when she has that trust that the writer knows exactly what they’re doing. I like that feeling also. Just last night I listened to J.K. Rowling and Daniel Radcliffe talk and Rowling mentioned how she had an entire back story for McGonagall ready to go in the books but it never made it. I love that. The knowledge that this woman knew everything there was to know about her characters.

Planning is subjective and many writers argue about it. Stephen King does not plan. John Irving always knows the final sentence of his novels before he writes it and sometimes writes the novels back to front, all over the place. But what all these writers have in common – what me and my roommates have in common – is that we all begin with a white blank page.