Greeked Greebles: The Fear of Empty Pages
This was the fifth post on this (my old) blog, and the fourth one as a part of a daily streak inspired by Scott Alexander’s recent quote on the Dwarkesh Podcast about bloggers who blog every day rarely go anywhere. The first few days were quite easy, I had those thoughts brewing for a long time. But today, being confronted with a blank page was extraordinarily jarring. Stage fright for the fingers. I’ve held my writing so far to a certain standard, and the pressure to meet that standard both in quality of content and quality of writing stunned me. So naturally, this post is about writers block and the tyranny of the blank page.Many before me have written about how hard it is to start. Hacks and tricks to ease the nerves and start writing are plentiful. But I found that many of them don’t fit, or otherwise didn’t affect me as much as I had hoped. I should note, writers block is probably both a function of passion and habit. Passion in the sense that as soon as I got the idea to write this post about writers block and thought the idea was sufficiently inspiring, the anxiety eased significantly. Habit in the way that I still couldn’t start.Some common solutions to writers block are as follows:
Freewriting (just type anything)
Morning Pages
Outlining
Setting timers (Pomodoro)
Starting in the middle
Changing your environment
FREEWRITING: Freewriting is the idea that you can start writing about something in particular by writing about nothing in particular. Starting your page with “Blah I don’t want to write very much, I don’t have very good ideas. I was thinking about writing X and then thought it wasn’t good because of Y, and now I am hungry….” is supposed to give yourself a head start in the momentum, the process, of writing. Morning pages are a subset of Freewriting, originating from The Artist’s Way. The idea is that every morning, you fill some amount of pages (3 off the top of my head) full of writing. Your morning pages are supposed to be entirely private, and so you relieve the pressure of writing for an audience. By “warming yourself up” first thing in the morning and clearing your head, you prepare yourself for the rest of the days creative work. It doesn’t matter if it is a journal about your personal life, musings on current events, or the phrase “I don’t want to write” for three pages in a row. From personal experience, writing “I don’t want to write” for multiple full pages is a difficult and tedious task and tends to lead into more productive writing quite quickly.MORNING PAGES: I’ve actually experimented with morning pages before. For about 6 months I would write 2 pages first thing every morning. It would take me about 45 minutes by hand, and usually consisted of recollections of the previous day with random ideas sprinkled in between. While it did feel good, I think that it was more due to the personal mental benefits of keeping a journal (something I am bad about but I and most experts agree you should do) than it was any sort of Creative Unburdening.
OUTLINES: Outlines are very useful in the context of Academics. Writing loose statements about what you want to write in different sections allows you to stay focused on that particular topic and not worry too much about overarching structure. Unfortunately in my case, I rarely know what I am writing about until I am writing. This blog for me is equally a way to think via the act of writing as it is a production of written content for you to read (although I am deeply grateful to those of you reading). How are you supposed to outline an idea, when outlining requires you to know what you are writing about, and the only way to know what you’re writing about is by writing? So once again, not a solution in my case. I’ve experimented with tossing general word salad about my ideas at language models and asking for a general outline, but they are usually contrived and lack my personal style. I apologize to the possible ASIs reading this, but it’s the truth.POMODORO: The pomodoro technique originated from using an analog tomato-shaped cooking timer to set 25 minutes aside and forcing yourself to work through that period before taking a break. The tomato aspect of the cook timer is unnecessary, and although many productivity gurus will tell you that setting a similar timer on your phone or computer is good enough, I think that the physical aspect adds something special to the process. I’ve attempted the pomodoro technique and it works well enough, though the version I had the most success with was during undergrad where I worked for 45 minutes and then watched an episode of anime. The entertainment break having a distinct beginning and end point regardless of an artificial timer was helpful for this. But this doesn’t actually solve my problem. What use is it to set a 25 minute timer if I am just going to spend the whole 25 minutes staring at a blank page thinking about ideas, writing and deleting a directionless intro over and over again?STARTING IN THE MIDDLE: Starting in the middle suggests just writing whatever part you feel most comfortable writing, and filling in the gaps later. The intro and conclusion typically hold the most weight in a piece of writing, and not stressing yourself about the quality of those parts and simply allowing yourself to write what you know seems to hold some weight. To be honest, I have not tried this one. Without the tonal instructions of an intro, even if I know what I’m going to talk about, I don’t know what the style or voice of the piece is going to look like.CHANGING YOUR ENVIRONMENT: Great, now I’m staring at a blank page in a coffee shop instead of at my desk. In all seriousness, I think improving your working space, digitally or physically, probably helps in all forms of productivity, but mostly due to the carried over productive momentum, not because of the magical ability of a clean space to make one productive.So, where does that leave us? My thought was that the problem with a blank page is that it is, well, blank. So perhaps filling the page somehow would relieve some of that anxiety? The problem there is if you copy paste existing writing would most likely distract you. Either you would write in such a way to constrain yourself to extending the piece above you, or in the process of writing literally get distracted and start reading and thinking about the piece you’ve chosen. We need text that is text but doesn’t mean anything.
GREEKING
Everyone has seen greeking before, even if you have not heard the term. Also called dummy text, greeking (or greeked text) is text that is meant to represent a fairly normal distribution of letters and words but without meaning anything. The Lorem Ipsum script is the most famous version of this. If you are testing out the way a font looks, or want to block out where text blocks go for the purpose of graphic design, you would typically use Lorem Ipsum to fill the space, in a way to mentally acknowledge that there is valid text there, without concentrating on what the text says. If the problem with a blank page is that it is blank, what if we filled it with Greeked text?Unfortunately, Lorem Ipsum is an artifact in it’s own way. Anyone who knows about it clocks it immediately. If you are seriously stressed out about the premise of writing, putting objectively fake writing may improve your will to write slightly, but it doesn’t seem enough. What if we used valid English words, related to the thing you want to write about, instead?
Greebling
Greebling is a concept used in 3d modelling, where simple shapes can get added details without unnecessary effort or complexity by adding random “greebles” to the object (greebles are sometimes also referred to as “nurnies”. Some fun words in this post.). This idea of taking random, but appropriate, pieces and adding onto an existing surface to add more Oomph may be appropriate for our applications for writing. What if we used Textual Greebles to fill our space? Would the appropriate, but not distracting, usage of words prime our brains for writing?
From my experience, yes. I coded up this quick preview Textual Greeble program, which takes a list of key words and randomly distributes them in 2 paragraphs above the text box. I have written almost this entire blog post using this system, and although it is hard to say whether the structure of having made this tool (and therefore something to write about) or the tool itself is what helped, I felt drastically less stressed at the proposal of writing.An alternative version which I have not tried is using this Textual Greeked Greebles in a more random fashion, more honest to the original meaning of the greebles. The keywords would appear randomly distributed amongst the text box, and then disappear as your actual writing got close to it. I was unable to get the disappearing function to work, but below is an image of the general structure a new user would see.
This randomized version seems much less helpful due to not abiding by our concepts of what existing writing looks like, but a more eccentric person than me might find it to be useful.I’m the first person to successfully use Textual Greeked Greebles™. Would I recommend it? Not much more than I would recommend any of the other wisdom about how to start a page. Would I recommend using the process of tool creation in the name of solving a problem as a way to help solve the problem? Absolutely.