The Writing Cave #101
The Fear of the Blank Page, and What I Do Anyway
Hello Friend,
Let’s be honest about one of the biggest fairy tales in a writer’s life: once you know the story, the words just pour out like beer from a tap.
They don’t. Not even close. The blank page has teeth. It grins at you. Doesn’t matter how many books you’ve written or how many times you’ve told yourself it’ll be different this time. It isn’t. You sit there with the story burning a hole in your head, and still that first sentence won’t come. Not the way you want it to. You want it sharp and perfect, a spark that sets the whole thing on fire. But all you get is the slow blink of the cursor, like it’s saying, Well? You gonna do something, genius?
That’s what I call writer’s paralysis. The story’s ready to run, but your brain’s tied up in knots.
When that happens, I stop trying to wrestle the big, important thing. You can’t fight a monster head-on. You start small. You pick something dull, something you can’t possibly screw up. A chair. The sound of rain. The smell of the room. You write that, and pretty soon, the story starts breathing again.
The Cure: Start with the Mundane
Here’s my weird little trick, and it’s so simple it almost feels stupid: I start with the most ordinary thought I can dig up.
I don’t begin with the hero’s heartbreak or the killer’s dark secret. I start with something small, something real. The grit under the fingernails. The thing that’s bugging my character. The object in the room that doesn’t mean anything yet but somehow feels like it might.
Don’t start with “Frank Mallory knew he had to leave town fast, but the fear kept him locked in the house.”
Start with “The mug of cold coffee sat on the counter with a ring of dried condensation, and the thought of cleaning it was more exhausting than running for his life.”
Or “The neighbor’s dog was barking at nothing again, the only sound in the heavy upstate quiet, and she wished she’d bought a place with a taller fence.”
Why does that work? Because it gets your boots on the ground. It cuts through the noise in your head. You’re not writing the Great American Novel anymore; you’re just describing a cold mug of coffee. No pressure. No genius required. It’s real, it’s right there, and if you follow that tiny, stupid detail long enough, the story will start breathing on its own.
The Movie in My Head
Once I have that one small, honest detail, my brain does what it always does. It rolls film.
I start seeing it like a movie scene. I’m the camera guy now. If I began with that cold coffee mug, what comes next? Maybe the shot pans up to a pair of tired hands. Maybe the light catches the dust drifting through the kitchen air. Maybe there’s a small shake in the fingers as the phone starts to ring.
That’s the part I live for. It’s not about the car chases or the screaming. It’s about catching the heartbeat underneath. Even when I’m writing something dark, when there’s a killer on the loose or a ghost whispering in the walls, it’s the small, human stuff that matters. The things that show who a person really is before everything goes to hell.
When I start with the simple, I can build everything else on top of it. A mug. A dog barking in the yard. A flickering porch light. Little things that hold the whole world together if you look long enough.
You can’t fix a blank page, but you can fix a bad one. So start small. Start with the coffee mug. The rest will follow, one heartbeat at a time.
My best,
J.C.
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They came for him. They killed her instead.
Frank Mallory walked away from the life. Ex-enforcer. Quiet job in a PI office. A home with Patricia, he never thought he deserved.
Then a pro hit misses and takes Patricia.
Grief burns out the man she made. What’s left is the old Mallory: patient, watchful, lethal.
He hunts the shooters and cuts into the city’s underbelly. Old debts surface. Darker secrets move in the shadows. Each step pulls him closer to the monster he used to be.
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A dead man. A black feather. A pact no one talks about.
When old secrets thaw, Police Chief Shauna Peterson races a winter killer through Shadow Bay.
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