The page is the answer to all your questions, from “what happens next?” to “should I keep trying?” The page answers yes and better than yes. The page produces story, scene, character, wisdom, humor, the small scratch of life and the wide, convex horizon. The page brings out the writer. Don’t want for inspiration or insight–the page is your muse.

Even when we teach story development–with a deep dive into structure and character arc–we’re really offering a series of incredibly helpful questions to ask yourself in a spirit of play, of curiosity, of exploration. You can wing it in a draft or in a list or in a concept map. Still, you have to wing it to take flight. The page is your runway.

Off the page, you are afraid, told by your internal fear-monger that it can’t be done, you don’t know, won’t know, might not even produce a decent sentence. But get ink against the fibers of cotton, get the neat pixels of the alphabet below your fingers in front of a blank screen, heck, write in wet sand, sidewalk chalk, the dusty window of your car. The words surface. Oh! you exclaim, scribbling on to find out more.