Writer's Block

by cinnamonbuns

Forward

It started as it always starts, with a blank sheet of paper.

I’ve always thought that there’s something inexplicable about blank paper. Maybe it’s the color. It is a pleasing off-white reminiscent of those old photos you keep in your inherited albums filled with memories of times you wish you’d had a chance to see and ponies you wish you’d had a chance to meet. For no beginning is truly a blank, rather perhaps a culmination of things and ponies past, given a chance to live again through their memories left behind in your not yet forgotten albums and in your memories. Maybe it’s the sound—that cool swishhhh as you slide the paper across the desk in front of you. It refreshes you, reminding you of the simple perfection of the world untouched. If only ponies weren’t so foolish as to attempt to better it by crossing paper with a pen; but what is art if not imperfect? Not art, I’m sure. Perhaps it’s the smell, a smell that can’t be properly described, although possibly with the word “fresh”. The smell brings with it a promise of something new, good or bad. It is promisingly sweet, and forebodingly pungent. Perhaps it is unwise to read too much into the smell of paper, but I can’t help but be enamored by the way the untainted wafts beckon to me. They beg me to create, and I must oblige, because one must unwaveringly stride towards the future, and as always, the future remains unwritten.

I think the thing that gets me about the whole thing is the endless possibility. They say that the most powerful words are the ones left unspoken, and I must wholeheartedly agree. As I stare at the blank page before me, my mind’s eye sparkles with the beauty of every painting that has ever been painted, every novel yet to be written, every story never to be told. There is nothing more beautiful than the endless field of opportunity unspoken within every blank sheet of paper, and nothing I ever create can ever compare to the beauty of the void—white. But, alas, I cannot make a living selling an empty canvas; curse me for uttering something so cynical. So the duty of the artist is to stare into the emptiness and through maybe nothing other than sheer force of desire pull out a single thread of beauty and share it with the world. Nothing I could humbly create can compare to the beauty of the paper on which it was written, but that is not the point. Because the paper isn’t art, it is only the beginning. It is only the beginning of this story, and the other ones, which I am about to tell you.