Yesterday I tweeted that I was sitting in a café with an empty notebook, a pen and a skinny latte seeking inspiration for a short story. A few moments later I experienced one of those eureka moments, a “light in the dark” epiphany, as I took to task the ailing brain that was refusing all reasonable requests to cooperate with my need for creativity. I am excited to tell you that I have now broken the chains of blank page fear that were holding me back. I am no longer terrified that the blank page will remain for ever blank. I have a new all-encompassing love for said blank page. I am free and enjoying my glorious liberty.

“What on earth are you prattling on about?” you ask.

Well, as I sat looking at that page I realised that F Scott Fitzgerald once looked at an empty page too before The Great Gatesby was born. Arthur Conan Doyle too had a Sherlock-Watson-Moriarty free piece of paper. So too pre-Potter Rowling, Kipling, Shakespeare, Austen, Bronte et al. Did Rudyard Kipling sit there one day before the great poem If was born and say, “If only I knew what to write on this damned blank sheet? The work of every single writer began as a blank page with not a single word looking back up at them. I have excitedly come to realise that I am in the company of every great in the history of writing.

And it doesn’t stop there. Van Gogh, Picasso, Dali, Renoir and every other artist who ever lived sat once in front of a blank canvas and wondered what to draw or paint. From those moments inspiration was born and they were motivated to create the results that we admire today. I am in the company of every great artist who ever lived.

Let’s go on. Even as a Beatles fan it’s not my favourite song ever but Paul McCartney once sat with no words or melody and that nothingness went from nothing to a song called Scrambled Eggs that became Yesterday, said to be the most covered song in the history of popular music. Take your favourite song(s). Every single one of them was an unadulterated piece of nothingness before it became the emotional soundtrack to your life.

Is there more? Of course! We talk about our life being a blank canvas. Well mine is not going to stay blank. I intend to fill it with things I have created. I want every day to be the day I draw or write or play or sing or enjoy something that wasn’t there at the start of it.

I am no longer afraid of, or frustrated at, the blank page in front of me because it points to some future act of cre8ivation at some undefined point in time. Let’s get filling those lines, canvases and staves and enter the company of history’s great writers, artists and composers.

©Cre8ivation