Rant to the Blank Page

Because every writer knows how this feels.

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Dear Blank Page,

How dare you presume I have any interest in letting you win. You think you’re all that with your smug openness and your daunting empty space, well, I have news for you. I find the very fact that you exist insulting.

Yes, insulting. You are downright despicable, and pompous, not to mention infuriating and frustrating and all the things I’ve come to loathe about creativity.

But it’s not just me. You sir, or ma’am, or it…are inflicting anxiety on writers everywhere. Do you have any idea how many writers sit down every day hoping to be the one to crack you? The one to turn your alabaster void into a best seller? And how many will actually succeed? Do you care at all the pain and sweat we’ve injected into the verbiage typed upon your face? Or is it that we’re writing upon your face that makes you so imposing?

You do realize that you don’t have the right to stay that way? To remain empty? To remain “the” nothing that writers can sometimes avoid like a visit to a dentist? Can you really be so awful as to digress when we spend hours checking email and Facebook to avoid you? Have you no backbone? Of course you don’t.

Why don’t you try helping for once? You have auto correct and wider indents or wider spacing so that fewer words can feel more productive. Isn’t there anything else you can do? Can’t you lie to me? Can’t you read my thoughts? Why, if you could do that, life would be way better because then, for once in my life, (and I’m sure I can vouch for others) everything would translate onto you exactly as it was in my mind and we BOTH know that NEVER happens.

I think I can actually hear you laughing. Or maybe see it. My screen is vibrating. Or is that in my head? I should take it easy on the wine.

Again, just because I’m drunk doesn’t mean I need to feel inebriated to deal with you, so don’t let that go straight to your word processor.

You know what? At this point, I’ll settle for word graffiti or strings of vowels or expletive-deleted’s, followed most incongruously by something intelligent. Should I be lucky, I’ll wipe you out purely from spite for being the pain-in-the-ass, silent treatment you are.

You’re like that crush I had in high school where I practiced over and over again in my head what I was going to say only for it to be time for the words to make an appearance into actual air space, and then nothing.

Only now it’s you, an empty eight-and-a-half-by-eleven.

For the love of J.K. Rowling herself, I have hands out and I’m pleading, in the proverbial butt-in-chair grovel you’ve asked for, and all I see is that DAMN BLINKING CURSOR!

That’s your way of mocking me, isn’t it? Well, it isn’t funny.

I feel like I’m talking to myself. Where’d you go?

Oh.

You’re gone.

By Rachael Maltbie

From: United States

Instagram: rmmaltbie

Twitter: rachaelmaltbie