You sit down to write. The coffee is hot, your headphones are on, and you’ve finally carved out a bit of quiet time. Everything is in place. You open the document, ready to begin.

And then nothing happens.

Just the screen in front of you.

A blinking cursor.

A white page that somehow feels heavier than it should. It doesn’t shout or complain. It just waits. But that stillness can feel like judgment. Without saying anything, the blank page seems to suggest that you have nothing worth putting down. It makes you question your ideas, your ability to express them, and even whether you’re a real writer at all. Of course, none of that is true.

But in the moment, the blank page is very good at making it feel true. There is something about emptiness that turns into pressure the longer you stare at it. It’s just a clean sheet of paper or a digital screen, but it starts to feel like a test. You might worry that what you write will come out wrong. You might imagine wasting time or saying something silly. You might hesitate because you think someone might read it and quietly decide it’s not very good.

These aren’t unusual thoughts. They are, in fact, part of the work. The blank page feels powerful, but it only gains that power when we give it room to grow in our heads. In reality, it is just space. The only way to take its power away is to begin. And that beginning can be anything. It does not need to be profound or clever. You can write your name, the date, a random line from a song, or even “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Once you’ve started, something shifts. The silence is broken. The pressure eases. You’re no longer confronting the page. You’re in it.

It helps to have a few strategies for when that weight sets in:

• You can try free-writing for five minutes without stopping.
• You can jot down a rough list of what you want to cover.
• If typing feels stiff, try using pen and paper instead.
• Or you can give yourself a deadline, even a fake one. Promise yourself you’ll write something before your next coffee, before the next notification, before you check anything else.

These are not shortcuts. They are ways of coaxing yourself out of hesitation and into motion.

The first thing you write will almost certainly be bad. It should be. That is how it works. No one writes something brilliant on their first try. The first draft is messy and unclear and full of things you will later cut or rewrite. That is not a failure of the process. It is the process. You are not supposed to be good yet. You are supposed to begin.

It does not matter where you begin. You can skip the introduction and go straight to the middle. You can write the last line first. You can describe a moment or sketch a character or try to explain a feeling that you don’t fully understand. The order will come later. The structure can be shaped. But none of that happens until something exists. You don’t need a perfect start. You just need a start.

The blank page isn’t lying to you because it hates you. It’s lying because you’ve learned to see it as something more than it is. It’s not a judgment. It’s not a verdict. It’s just a place. And like any place, it becomes what you do in it.

You do not need confidence before you begin. You need movement. You need five minutes of imperfection. You need one sentence, then another. And then you’re in.

Once you’re in, the blank page disappears. Because it isn’t blank anymore. It’s yours.