FACING THE BLANK PAGE, WEEK 1

I began Operation: Blank Page on Sunday, May 22, as I’d planned. Having just returned from a biography conference in Washington, I wrote about that—more journal than report. Resistance was strong at first. Reaching my goal of 1000 words was hard; 500 seemed like a natural stopping point. But I managed to push through, hoping that once my subconscious realized how serious I was, it would buckle down and get to work.

The first snag came the next day. I had an overnight guest Sunday and Monday nights. Naively, I’d thought I could continue with the program anyway. But I live in a small apartment. No way to ignore the presence of another person. For two days I wrote nothing. Determined not to let this derail me, I got back in the saddle Wednesday morning and again wrote just over 1000 words, most of it a combination of memoir, plans for future projects, especially my Millay biography, and a paragraph on Millay’s character that would come in useful later. Another couple of paragraphs, on a friend’s book, became a blog post later that week.

I sailed through the next three days, easily exceeding 1000 words a day. I wrote the beginning of a second chapter for a short story I was thinking of turning into a novel. I wrote the beginning of a piece on my first childhood encounter with black people—material I hope to someday use in a book and/or post to my blog. I wrote about my tastes in biography, my aims for the one I’m writing, and further reflections on Millay’s character, all useful material.

I kept a progress chart (numbers in boldface represent meeting my minimum daily goal):


Date              5/22     23     24       25         26       27       28
# words         1057     0        0      1033     1008    1128    1037
Total             1057    1057   1057  2090     3098    4226    5263
Average         1057     529   352      523       620    704      752

All was going along swimmingly. Then I hit snag number two.

[to be continued]