Derek attacks the blank page like a serial killer attacking a victim. Every word is a blow. He wants to kill it. Kill the blankness of the page -- and if it has to be blood spattered all over the white, so be it. Killing empty space is no crime.
It doesn't matter what the words are. Strangely, Derek has always found the words take care of themselves. He's never had writer's block. Writing is a form of violent dreaming. He always has dreams (and thoughts, and feelings) so he always has words. He just puts his hands down on the paper and things come out. Later, he can shape them, sculpt the wounds in the paper.
The trouble with wounds is they're hard to line up into chapters. So Derek tends to write short pieces. And wounds can be unpleasant to look at, so he'll often write something, turn the page, and never go back. A finished story is finished. Trying to sell it, let alone read it again, is just a bad idea. Never return to the scene of the crime, he thinks. That is how they catch you.
There are volumes of murdered pages in his home. Some are hidden on shelves. Others are hidden in the hard drive of his computer. Still other victims are buried on the Internet.
Again, no one notices these are killings. It is not a crime to murder blank pages. Everyone does it. Everyone is killing empty space. When a woman walks through a room, her body murders emptiness. Even something as simple as a hand gesture can kill emptiness.
Sometimes, Derek thinks that maybe killing emptiness is wrong. Murdering blank pages is wrong. If only he could find a different way to write. If only there was a way to write that didn't kill the blankness, that kept it intact. Write white letters on white paper. Use invisible ink.
Imagine a novel of blank pages. Force a reader to stay on each page for thirty seconds. Force them to read an empty book as though it were a novel. Like monks sitting, meditating, staring at a blank wall -- but in book form. Would that be an experience of pure peace, or would it just be torture and stupidity?
For reasons Derek doesn't understand, the concept of writing blankness terrifies him. He meant it as a joke for himself, an intellectual gag, but he finds it genuinely frightening. It makes him think of the novels of Virginia Woolf. Derek hates her books. They are so empty and bland. Maybe, he thinks, she was writing blankness and emptiness.
When he was forced to read Mrs. Dalloway in high school, he felt like he was being forced to read an empty book. Stare at these blank pages. Read them. Process them.
Derek remembers nothing of the novel at all. None of it stuck. He just remembers cold, emptiness, blankness, nothing.
"I will keep killing the page," he thinks, and tries to think of this statement as a sort of passionate, angry, Hemingway statement. Bull fighting and violence and play. Fight Club. Wildness. Crazy fun.
But now that he's thought of it, he worries the blankness will creep into his words. And, in a way, he welcomes it. Somehow embracing at least a little nothingness feels like maturing, as a writer. And maybe it's empty space that joins chapter-wounds together into something as big as a novel.
Blank walls
demand
to be smeared
with shit.
Empty rooms
demand
to be cut
with gestures.
Blank pages
demand
to be soaked
in blood.
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