The page is never blank.
Not very long ago I had a bit of a revelation about my creative process. For ages I used to say “I can’t compose [music] anything without something visual or a story to base it off of.” Then when I got those things I’d feel really limited and my music would come out stifled. When I had the realization I was listening to a track (oddly from a movie [a visual]: Secret of Kells) during this very open and free-flowing part and realized that I felt like I needed something to write to because I think my music won’t be listened to without it and that I’m also afraid of what I’d have to “say” musically without a visual or background distraction. That I am afraid of being musically inadequate and therefore fear rejection. I then realized that this directly correlates to my physical issues; “no one will think I’m a good vocalist because I am too fat and don’t fit the ideal physical image of someone with a beautiful voice”. Who could ever believe a fat person can be talented. Yet another totally weird mutation of low self-esteem.
Another realization cropped up shortly after this one (funny how when you aren’t being compressed at all sides from you job and location your mind starts working again) but pertaining to the written word instead of the musical word: fear of the large, blank page. Not the theoretical page where we are to mine out the inner recesses of our thoughts, but literal page with its large empty spaces! (I wonder if this is a type of agoraphobia…) To delve even further, it is not the fear of not knowing what to write but not being able to write enough and again, the fear of it being stupid or inadequate.
I thought this was a totally silly fear when I realized I was struggling with it. When I first started writing Emily I decided to put the cinematic or screenplay aspects of it into this small book. Of course the job and big-city life took over and that book sat in a corner, collected dust and got this mysterious sun-stain on it’s spine (in an apartment that only got a sliver of direct sunlight in mid-morning and that book was no where near it). Too lazy and feeling the surge of a creative wave too strongly I decided to keep writing in that book instead of typing things out. I only wrote during my breaks (this little hobby actually made my take my breaks at work! Wonderful!) and during my lunch. One day I looked up from the page and leafed through what I had written and was very surprised I had taken up a good portion of the small book! That had never happened before! It was then that I realized my silly little fear. And kept writing.
I was able to finish, finally, the entire beginning section of Emily and it was written entirely in a small 3 x 4 inch faux silk brocade notebook whose shoddy binding kept letting pages fly loose at will.
(The sheet music is a transcription of “The Fated Path” by Hitoshi Sakimoto from the game Odin Sphere on the Playstation2. My intentions have been to make an illuminated, framed copy of the piece as a gift to my brother. Yet another unfinished project. The title and symbol at the end are in Futhark. The symbol is the Futhark “combination rune” for my brothers name, Andres.)
So now I have all of these Barnes & Noble lined journals that just seem to big for me now :)
In all honesty though I am using them. The Sounders book has had pages of research in it for years now. The book for Will & Cass was dedicated several months ago but only until recently have new things been leaping into both of them. I realized, too, that writing isn’t linear…which is odd because when I write blogs and emails my writing is never linear. You should see this section started all the way at the top! I’m not sure why it never occurred to me to apply the same tactics when writing in books…perhaps because scissors and tape are so much more inconvenient than click, drag, ctrl+x and ctrl+v.
In Sounders, a story about sound in a society of sound, I recently wrote my first bit of dialogue. It was a combination of everything I learned from the above revelations. The character talks with the teacher about the rules of composition and asks why they are needed. Any composition student and teacher can tell you they are in place to serve as tools to complete the composition. At Berklee they taught us that they are tools to help you overcome the fear of a blank page. But the character knows that for those who know how to listen, the page is never blank.
And yes, reader, I realize that I’ve made mention of projects in this post that I never spoke of before in previous posts. I will only post when I have a content that has been copyrighted. Yeah, I’m protective like that.
