The White Page

There are few things as liberating as the blankness of a white page - or in this case, a text box - and there's little else as dreadful as the thought of spoiling it.

I used to have a blog. At the credulous age of 15 years old. It was 2008. I had things to say and a passion to voice them, armed with a growing repertoire of words I could spell but never pronounce. Therein lied the beauty of writing and flexing literary muscle without the embarrassment of pronunciation. The woes of spoken-word dyslexia.

I faithfully logged my life until I was 19. I thank those blogging years as giving me a head-start into the world of journalism; it gave me a foot up when no one would pass the stool. It let me extend myself into a sphere of writing that was teasingly uncensored and needed no permission. I've learned a lot since then, but in the pursuits of professional writing, I've lost the desire to write for me.

I read a book recently called Letters To A Young Writer. I picked it up in a bookshop after ambling from shelf to shelf, swapping tome for tome, squatted in front of particularly tasty rows, browsing until I felt the spines crease.

"You can't not write," Colum McCann spells out. "And be a writer." The words slapped me in the face. Outside of the shackles of freelance projects, where I'm yanking on the proverbial heels of words to pull them into being, rushed by the loom of a deadline, the fun of writing has been quashed.

Here's to blogging - long may it reign!