Writing essays: filling the dreaded blank page

As the school year gets underway and teachers assign essays, here is a big question for students: how can they can past their fear of the blank page?

It really can be the worst! Here you have an important assignment, whether it's 500 words or 5 pages, and all you have in front of you is...a blank page. Somehow you're supposed to turn that into brilliance, yet you don't have any ideas whatsoever. And no, you can't use AI.

Here are a few suggestions:

1. First, don't be afraid of the blank page or focus too much on the reality that you haven't written anything yet. The more negative you are, the more difficult it will become to write anything at all. Accept that you're at the beginning but will not always be.

From here, you have some options:

2. Brainstorming your ideas for 10 minutes can help. To make brainstorming effective, you can't censor yourself. You just start typing, and whatever comes out, comes out. Accept that about 90% of it will be pure junk. That's okay. 10% of it will be useable, and that will be enough to get you going.

3. While I always brainstorm and outline before writing my academic papers, my favorite option is to simply put up a couple of cruddy sentences. There it is. The page is no longer blank, and I finally have something to work with. From here, it's a matter of whittling. I change a word, then reread the sentence to see what happened to the overall essay. Sometimes I wipe the whole thing out and start again. Oh writing...such a pain sometimes, even for those of us who like to do it!

4. Last, remember this: leave yourself enough time to write to begin with. It's a lot easier to wrestle with a blank page when the assignment isn't due for a few weeks than it is when it's due tomorrow. When I get an assignment in graduate school, I always put the due date on the calendar. I then break down writing the paper into these stages:

- Reading/researching

- Brainstorming

- Writing the first paragraph

- Writing the second paragraph (etc.)

- Revisions

- Turning the paper in

Each of those stages gets its own specific due date. So long as I am hitting those deadlines, life is fine, and I have no reason to worry.

Overcoming the blank page really comes down to this: you have to persevere through the early muck and avoid situations, like procrastination, that only make coming up with ideas harder. Know yourself, create a system, give yourself permission to be terrible (for a while), and eventually, the page will be full.