The best way to deal with a blank page (or blank screen) is to simply not have one. Asking how one deals with a blank page is a bit like asking how one deals with an Ed Hardy thumb ring or a pinstriped fedora. Just avoid that whole landmine by not ever having one. It helps to have a backlog of ideas -- more ideas that you could ever possibly need or turn into finished stories. I keep a text file of half-baked ideas to develop should I ever get some spare time -- and some of them aren't half-bad. Be riddled with ideas. Sodden with them. So many ideas that you start to gag just in describing how many ideas you have.

When faced with the blank page or screen, I was a coward to the nth degree. Decades later, I still am. I might, in fact, be even more fearful now -- because experience has made me excruciatingly aware that the most intimidating, daunting, and unnerving material is typically the most vital to pursue. When, after years of abandoned starts, I recently started working with what is my most personally challenging material of all -- I can hardly bear to mention it here -- I found the blank screen and page had again bested me. In desperation, I have turned to cue cards. I write a sentence, fast, heart in my throat, and throw the card into a box.

You'd have thought Maclean's would have blazoned the death of Section 13 all over its front cover. With a massive headline along the lines of "SCREW YOU, CENSORS!!!" Or "WE WON!!!" Instead, the cover featured a generic picture of an innocuous youngish woman and an innocuous youngish man grinning maniacally and the silly headline: "The majority of us are singles. So why do we still live in a couples world?"