Blank Page Syndrome and Priming the Pump

Ever find yourself sitting in front of the computer with a blank word processing document open and no ideas about where to start?  Neither research papers, book reports, nor the next great novel can write themselves, so how do you go about breaking the ice that's formed over that blank document?
Start writing!  Is it really as simple as that?  Yes and no, but mostly no.

There's something about all that white space that causes it to carry an unimaginable weight.  It's as if the blank page is instead a massive snowbank weighing your writing down.  I've found that the only way to beat the snowbank is to just start writing.  It doesn't really matter how profound you are during this phase of writing.  The goal here is just to get something on the paper to counteract the weight of all that blank snow.  Words carry far more weight than nothingness ever can.

So can you just start banging away at the keyboard?  If that works for you, sure, but you might want to lose a few misconceptions before you do.  If you are afraid of a little effort, this probably won't work for you.  Then again, you probably shouldn't be writing to start with.  I hear there are still openings for couch potatoes.  If you only feel that you should write down things that are important to the task at hand, then this won't work for you either.

Okay, so here we are with our blank page and nothing to write. Time to prime the pump.  The old style water pumps took some work to get started before the water came spewing out.  In my experience it's the same with writing.  Instead of just writing anything that comes to mind, try to keep some type of goal in mind.  If you are writing a research paper on thermodynamics, then start by listing the parts that you found interesting or what seemed the most important to your paper.

Just jot them down right there on that blank document.  You can't hurt it, and besides that's what the backspace and delete keys are for (clean up the mess later).  You're only goal is to get some momentum started and eventually get to the point where you realize that you've been writing away.

If you are writing a story but stuck on the beginning, skip it for now.  Not all stories start at the beginning, or it could just be that you don't know enough about what should happen in your story to write the beginning properly.  The same is true if you get stuck in the middle: skip ahead to something else.  Hopefully, once you get some words, sentences, and paragraphs down, you'll find that the writing process starts to become an avalanche.  After that it'll be easier to go back and add in the parts you couldn't figure out before.

Working like this, you'll probably end up doing a lot more editing.  Sorry.  If other methods aren't working for you, my personal opinion is that I'd rather have to trim and cut a lot later on than not have anything at all written now.

If your goal is to write, write!