The blank page doesn't exist

What I've learned to do with my silences, on the days when the words won't come.

People often ask me how I manage to write anyway, on certain days. The truth is, I've never really been afraid of the blank page. What frightens me is the page full of sentences I don't like, the ones we write just to feel like we're moving forward, and that say nothing.

For a long time, I believed a block was a lack of inspiration. Today, I think it's more often a lack of permission. We sit down in front of the screen demanding of ourselves something beautiful, useful, publishable, and it's precisely that demand that paralyzes us. The best scenes I've ever written were almost always born from sentences I thought I'd throw away.

So I changed my way of working. On the hard days, I no longer try to write well. I just try to write true, even clumsily. A line with no context. A sensation. A piece of dialogue that may serve no purpose in the final story, but that sets me back in motion. A draft never needs to be beautiful. It only needs to exist, so that I can then make it better.

There's also an idea I'm often reminded of in writing workshops: you can't rewrite a blank page. As long as there's nothing, there's nothing to correct, nothing to dig into, nothing to discover. But once a few lines exist, even imperfect ones, they become material. And material, we know what to do with that.

What I'd say to those who feel stuck: don't look for inspiration, look for movement. Walk, change rooms, read aloud what you've already written. And above all, accept that on some days, the text you produce won't be good, it will simply be a bridge toward the day when it will be.

The blank page doesn't really exist. What exists is the fear of not living up to what we imagine. And that fear, we learn to soothe it, book after book.

And you, what helps you get moving again, on the days when nothing comes?