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I think being faced with the blank page problem is such a wonderful way to push yourself and sit with discomfort. There is nothing I hate more than staring at a blank page when I know that I should be writing. But when it’s something creative, like I want to build out a character or a story line, I think sitting with the blank page can be so useful.

I usually just starting writing whatever comes to mind, as a way to alleviate the stress of looking at nothing. I’ll lament about how frustrated I am and how I wish I could figure out what to say. Then usually I start typing about my day. And somehow, the brain eventually unlocks, like when you’re trying to get a knot out of a muscle. It relaxes and allows you to write something different and get into a flow state.

The other thing I usually do when I’m trying to fill up a blank page, is I refuse to go back and delete or fix anything. Typos, misspellings, grammatical errors, I won’t touch them until I’ve gotten to a point in my writing where I’ve created enough momentum that I know I can pick it back up again. I’ve found that going back and fixing all your little mistakes, especially on work that you’re definitely not going to keep and was just helping you ramp up, is a great way to distract yourself from doing the actual writing.

Now, with the ability for AI to write things for us, I’ve had a somewhat philosophical conversation about the blank page problem. Does it always serve a purpose? Is being able to alleviate that blank page immediately by writing a prompt and getting a wall of text good, actually? I don’t know that there’s a right answer, but for creative work, I don’t think it’s helpful. I think it’s actively detrimental.

I think the ability to sit with discomfort and push yourself through it build resilience and confidence. It teaches you that you can do the hard thing. It teaches you that you are capable. It teaches you that you can try again and be better each time. And I think stripping that away where an answer can come easily with a quick prompt steals from us. I think it allows us to feel like we’re doing more by challenging us less.

As humans, there’s very little that separates us from animals. And the more we learn about wildlife, the more we discover that animals share a lot of what we used to claim was only human: a sense of humor, laughter, culture, grief, loss, tool usage, the ability to learn and teach, direct communication, future planning, the list goes on. So far, there are only a few things that humans are truly unique at and one of them is art. Music, physical arts, dancing, writing, all of these start with a blank page problem: What do I want to say? What do I want to do? What am I trying to express?

And I think that it’s these questions, and maybe only these questions, that make us human. So the idea of giving them up and letting a silicon based computer, instead of our built-in meat computer (that’s your brain folks), tell us what to create just makes me sad. Because the minute we get feedback from the prompt we are already trying to fit our ideas to confirm or reject what’s on the screen in front of us. And I don’t know if that’s “good” or “bad”. The older I get the more muddy these type of questions become. But what I do know is that it makes me sad. It makes me worry that we are willfully and freely giving up a beautiful part of ourselves that is maybe the only thing that makes us… us. So embrace your blank page problem. Yell at it. Cry at it. Type through the tears. Because I think that blank page is a big part of what makes us human.

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