Word Count Zero
You know how sometimes you get a word on the tip of your tongue but just can’t find it to spit it out? It’s like that with writing sometimes.
[...] It’s driving me mental.
It’s the blank page thing. Aaron Sorkin talked about it a bit, at the top of one of the West Wing scriptbooks. The blank page is the only critic that can hit you where you live. In one of the episodes, in fact, a journalist asks Sam why writing a major speech is hard, and Sam says, because it’s a blank piece of paper. It knows all your secrets. In Sorkin’s words, it sits there and hisses, “I know how you’ve been scamming all those people all these years, GIFTLESS, you wanna dance with me?”
And we really don’t. We stare into space for hours, running themes and structures and settings through our heads. And in my case the blank page sits there and says, you’ve done that. That’s old. You’ve said that before. And it drives you mental.
--- from "Swinging the Big Hook", by Warren Ellis