The Blank Page and Other Spaces: Finding Silence by Elizabeth Stark

I think and write about writing as facing the blank page. These days it’s more likely to be the white rectangle with an electronic backdrop of gray, toolbar above and dock below. A torturous invitation: what do you have to say? A playground of space to be filled.

For a time I used large sketchbooks, the kind with the black covers—hard back. Those thick, broad pages inspired me. I wrote with fountain pens. Angry words could scrawl and grow jagged. A tiny voice could be matched by careful little letters. Doodles wrapped around the edges and crept into the middle, too.

Last night, one of my students who’d worked hard to make time to go write outside of her house was talking about arriving at the café without her computer one day and then with only 10% charge another day. I had two things to say to her:

1)   Look—your obstacles are moving outside of you. Pretty soon they’ll float away.

2)   Napkins.

Do you remember writing on napkins? The way the ink soaks the fibers? The way the ideas insist on being transcribed now, at the club, at the breakfast spot, and not later, at home, when they’ll be only a vague sense of hope recalled?

Yesterday I went for a bike ride. There’s a long bike path up here that runs 14 miles, from Santa Rosa, though Sebastopol and on to Forestville. No cars. Just other bicyclists, pedestrians and their dogs and the occasional horse and rider.

I was listening to This American Life—only in one ear. I love This American Life, but it was a tense episode about troubled schools, and I noticed I was not enjoying my bike ride despite the rolling hills turning gold, the low mountains in the distance, the craggy oaks and wooden bridges over green rivers heading into the lagoon.

Finally I stopped, popped the little white bud out of my ear and stuffed the whole contraption into my pocket. Now the sounds of the day came to me. The distant traffic, the click and hum of my own bike, the birds in the tall grass. And then—my own thoughts.

For it is not only the empty page that calls for your sentences. It is the empty moment, the deceptive silence of the day. When people ask me how I kept writing with not just one but two babies, then two toddlers, this is what I remember: rocking in the dark and telling myself the story of my book; typing in the moments between their sleep and mine, my head nearly resting on the keyboard, my conscious mind and its inhibitions almost shut down, the words scratching their way onto the page. And how damn precious those empty moments became. They almost opened inward; having no breadths, they had instead a profound depth.

I’m sluggish now in the face of five and half hours between drop off and pick up for kindergarten. It’s not enough time—the most meaningful kinds of work, writing, teaching, parenting, always fill and overflow any time slot they are given—but it’s not a confined moment crowded by exhaustion.

Instead, though, I crowd it with input, with books podcasts and The New Yorker while I drink my tea (if I happen to get to sit down to drink it on a given morning) and novels. All good, so good. But there is something else the writing mind requires, absolutely. Emptiness. The blank page, the silent moment.

And so I encourage you, and me, to leave some spaciousness in the space, some empty in between the full. To see time and the mind as further invitations, new playgrounds that will pull the ink and ideas to the surface if you hang around in them for long enough.