by Sharda Patasar

Created on: October 30, 2008   Last Updated: January 07, 2010

Every writer fears the blank page. That blinking cursor, the doodling as you bite the head of the writing instrument in instalments; this is after all your life, your career, your survival and you must write something that can make you some money. But even the struggles for survival sometimes never eliminates the fear of a blank page.

Every blank page signifies the start of another trial: presentation, cross-examinations that throw your carefully crafted words off the page, while your heart aches because they represent days and months of slave labour. Then the day of final presentation and submission to verdict arrives. The success of your months of labour is now dependent on the public's decision. Thank God for some of us, they have no idea what we look like so that at least we can step out of our front door with some dignity intact.

But the above outlines what happens when we do put butt to chair and pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and produce. But I'm more concerned about the state of existence before the actual writing begins - the state of procrastination. It's the one habit that we hardly ever learn, it's inborn, comes naturally.

In the nation of procrastinate, things that were invisible to your naked eye suddenly become visible when there's a blank page lying on the table or in your typewriter or that blinking cursor on a blank computer screen. Was that vase always there? It should be in the dining room shouldn't it? Or our favourites - the motivational books on the craft of writing, biographies of authors who have experienced the same hardships that we are currently going through and suddenly - Yes! There comes the discovery that you share similar characteristics with a depressed Scott Fitzgerald or an alcoholic Ernest Hemingway or a suicidal Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf. The list can go on and on, but you catch the general drift.

Essentially, the point here is that we try to find all sorts of excuses that put off writing for a while. It's easier to live in the realm of imagination (although that's all fine when you are actually writing from there). The fact is that for a number of amateur writers, the reality is harsher. Dreams are preferable to confronting the issue of how painstaking a career this is, how much effort goes into one piece of work and, at the end, it may very well be rejected. And so we find ways and means of procrastinating. And one of them is the all too famous possession of the artistic 'temperament'.

We are sensitive people

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