MY MFA AESTHETIC: THE Blank page was never the problem
People talk about the blank page like it is a monster.
For me, the blank page has never been the scariest part.
I am not afraid of having nothing to say.
I am afraid of having too much.
That is a different kind of paralysis. Not emptiness, but traffic. Too many images. Too many memories. Too many sentences crowding the doorway, each insisting it should be the first one through. The fear is not that the well is dry. The fear is that the well is haunted and I have to decide which ghost gets to speak.
That is what writing often feels like to me: choosing.
Choosing what matters most. Choosing what can wait. Choosing which pain becomes story and which pain stays private. Choosing which version of the truth gets shaped into something another person might actually want to read.
I came to writing through filmmaking.
Since I was eight, I wanted to make films. Through theatre classes, drama clubs, and the general overconfidence of a young person who has not yet been punished enough by logistics, I became comfortable acting and directing. At one point, I decided I wanted to be a director of photography, partly because nobody else I knew seemed interested in it. I learned to light. I learned cameras. I learned enough to be dangerous and not enough to be good.
Then I tried to make my own things.
That is when I learned the first practical lesson of independent filmmaking: everyone else is also trying to make their own things.
Their scripts. Their shorts. Their ideas. Their weekends. Their favors. Their equipment. Their emergencies.
If I wanted to be a filmmaker, I could not wait for a perfect cavalry of collaborators to appear and ask what I needed.
I had to become, at least for a while, a one-man band.
That meant writing had to become part of the arsenal.
At the end of my undergraduate years, writing may have been the thing I was worst at. I had ideas. I had taste. I had opinions. I had the ability to talk about films in a way that probably made people regret asking.
But writing was different.
Writing required structure. Patience. Selection. The humility to put something on the page and discover it was not yet what it had been in your head.
Any team is only as strong as its weakest player, and my weakest player was the script.
So I went after it.
That is the clean version.
The messier version is that I also needed somewhere to put myself.
Weeks before I applied to my MFA program, my mother died. Four years before that, my brother had been killed in Iraq. By the time I was still young enough to be figuring out what kind of adult I wanted to become, my family had been cut in half.
Everything was new and scary. I had moved out of my hometown. I was engaged. I was trying to build a life while dragging a haunted house behind me.
I needed structure.
I needed a creative outlet.
I needed a place where the things inside me could become something other than symptoms.
At the time, I thought I was entering a writing program to become a better screenwriter.
I was.
But I was also entering a long confrontation with the parts of myself I kept trying to dramatize from a distance.
That is one of the tricks writing plays.
You think you are writing about a character.
Then, halfway through, you realize the character has been holding a mirror the entire time.
For years, I tried to write the story of my family. Then the story of my brother. Then the story of grief. Then the story of what loss does to a house, a father, a son, a future.
But underneath all of that, I was trying to write the story of myself without admitting it.
That was the missing piece.
I did not need to tell the authorized version of my family’s pain. I did not need to turn memory into a museum. I did not need to make a monument out of trauma and then defend every brick as fact.
I needed to tell the truth.
Not the same as reality.
Reality is what happened.
Truth is what it did to you.
The blank page was never the problem.
The problem was deciding which truth I was brave enough to face first.
