Welcome to the Random Writing Advice corner. Here, more offbeat or loosely connected pieces of writing advice that don’t fit within the main post of the month will be posted. These will either be on the first or second Wednesday of the month, depending on if I have announcements on the first Wednesday. For the first one, let’s focus on the first thing you see: that blank white page.
What to do about it
I know opening up a new document and starting to write can be intimidating. Even I found it intimidating at first. That blank white page staring at you, waiting for you to put words to it can be scary. However, you need to start writing if you’re going to finish writing, and I do have simple advice on that front: just start writing. Don’t worry about quality or anything like that, since you can always go back and rework it, or even do it over. The important thing is to get words on the page.
If it’s not working or you think you can do better and editing it to fix the issues won’t be enough, just draw some sort of line between what you wrote and what you will write. For example, I put a triple asterisk there, but a solid line, skull and crossbones (☠️), or anything else that marks off the new section as separate will work. You preserve the old writing for a simple purpose, to avoid having to look at that blank white page again. You don’t keep it forever, though. When you reach a good point, as defined by you, go back and delete the old stuff. It’s not like a few kilobytes of extra file history will hurt anything, and not having it there reduces confusion.
By the way, I’m going to do something unusual, and suggest that if this isn’t enough, you should search up blank page syndrome. There’s a lot of resources out there about this problem. Some sources call it writer’s block as well, but I see that as something different.