When Mark asked for blogs he could stop by on his blog tour, I jumped at the chance. I honestly can't recall how I stumbled onto Mark's site, This Writing Life, but his was one of the first writing/publishing blogs I put in my reader, along with EdAss (moonrat), EdAnon and Nathan Bransford, way back in 2008.

I have never know Mark's writing to be anything other than honest, economical and entertaining. And that doesn't change in the piece he brings today. I asked him if he'd mind writing about how he goes about approaching the blank page. When you finish ogling his author photo, read the piece below.

Blank Page Blues
By Mark Terry

Oh, all those unwritten words. You’ve got your title, then your byline, then … sure, those were easy, all you need now are another 90,000 words or so.

Honestly, that’s rarely a problem for me. My version of “writer’s block” involves marketability, and it rarely kills a manuscript before any words get written. It often kills the work around page 100 – way too often. Or it can kill it early on, within a few pages. No blank page, just a forlorn stillbirth.

Here’s an exercise I sometimes do to get going. I got it from an interview I read with David Morrell. His writing mentor was Philip Klass/William Tenn. Morrell asked Klass what he was doing, writing a bunch of novel beginnings and Klass said, “Test borings.”

Morrell said, “Oh, I get it. Like drilling tests to see if you hit water or oil.”

Klass gave him an odd look and said, “I just want to see if they’re boring.”

Well, it works for me. I’ll often give myself 5 to 10 pages of a novel just to see if it takes off. A lot of times they don’t. If I’m struggling with the idea, maybe it’s not a good idea, or, even more likely, it’s not a good idea for me. That’s important. I have lots of great ideas, just not all of them are suitable for my tastes, background and writing style. Or I’m just not ready for them. Keep in mind that Ken Follett wanted to write “The Pillars Of The Earth” years before he actually did, because he realized he wasn’t ready to write it when he was younger.

Sometimes I’ll abandon those 5 or 10 pages and keep coming back to them, to see if they’ll take off. That’s a good sign. That means to me that there’s something about that idea that I really like, but I just haven’t figured out how to approach it yet.

One example, for me, was my novel DIRTY DEEDS. I wrote maybe 100 pages and abandoned it. Six months later, with nothing working, I read what I’d written, said, “Hey, this is pretty good,” and completed the novel. It sold to the second publisher it went to.

A more recent example is a project I’m working on called CRYSTAL STORM. I tinkered with the first 20 pages or so for about two years. My agent was bugging me to come up with some different ideas and I threw out a couple and she was lukewarm, then I mentioned this one and she wanted to read it, loved it, and asked to see 100 pages. So I cranked out 100 pages. I’m still working on it and we’ll see where it goes.

A lot of books are like snow boulders, I think. You’ve got to find the right snow and get it rolling down hill. It’ll gain momentum and size on its own, but you’ve got to find the right snow and the right conditions first.

Thoughts?
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Mark's newest Derek Stillwater book, The Valley of Shadows, is available in hardcover and in a Kindle edition. Click the cover art to find out where.