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We’ve curated our best editorial secrets and industry insights into a series of articles. They range from getting started through staying on track and grasping the publishing business. Put those fuzzy slippers on your feet, pull up a cushy armchair, and enjoy.

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Fear of the Blank Page

 

When I was in mortuary school, I had the good fortune of being surrounded by a number of dead bodies. A dead body is always a shock, and the shock continues. I never really got used to walking into a room and feeling the presence of a dead person. They were not breathing shallowly. There was no actual danger; the closer and closer I got to the body, its eyes did not shoot open, nor did its arms reach out and grab my wrist like in a horror movie. The fear was all internal.

 

 

Why am I telling you this? Well, because all writes could be labeled “perfectionists.” We all have an internal critic, that parental or professorial voice which judges your efforts and finds them wanting.

When I was in the funeral home, a question I contemplated a lot was expressed most clearly by Stephen Batchelor: “Since death alone is certain, and the time of death is uncertain, what should I do?” For two or three months we’d have no one at the morgue. Then for six months in a row, we’d have ten bodies every day. The time of death is uncertain; death is not.

How do we handle something we can’t predict? Death is an experience upon which nothing can be predicated–meaning, we cannot take it as a subject. This frustration leads to wild hypotheses. As my wife says, “It’s a lot farther than Seattle.” It might lead to an obsession with safety. It might lead to a “carpe diem” mentality. It might lead to a fear of facing the blank page.

Eventually, I came to view all fears as microcosms of this one great fear: Uneasiness upon waking from a nap in winter, the “Sunday blues,” a relationship breaking up, a child leaving the nest…all fears come down to the fear of death. And conversely, all fears vanish in those moments when you are not afraid of death.

Some nights I would leave the funeral home and life would be so amazing, but not in any privileged way. The car noises soft in the drifting snow. The tomato on a hoagie (I think you call them subs here), just to taste it, the place where the pulpy part distinguishes itself from the rindy part… and the pepper on the tomato? It was more beautiful than a sunset.

In those moments, I found my heart greedy for human company. I believe the word is communicate, from the same root as community. The music on the radio was realer, the lyrics clearer, for what they were telling me about was my own world.

The purpose of life is to live. The purpose of a blank page is for you to fill it.