Any of us lucky enough to be literate will have been there. You sit yourself down with that blank page, you get your fingers round the pen or on the keyboard, you’re all poised and fired up, staring at the gleaming mass of white, waiting for that elusive creature, Thought. And then you begin, pressing the ‘on’ button in your mind with a lucid expectancy. But nothing happens. You can smell the slight whiff of panic. You push against that barrier as if you might break it by willpower alone. Come on, you think, It isn’t hard! It’s just putting words on a page… but of course you know that’s a lie that you’ve built to try and force yourself out of a state of uninspired frenzy...

If you’re finding that situation a bit too familiar at the moment and are expecting a miracle cure, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re willing to have a go at something to try and alleviate the symptoms, I have an idea.

I collect quotations in a notebook, and as I was flicking through it today, I came across one that I particularly like from Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’:

‘Every tree is big with a shadow that is not the shadow of the tree behind it.’

Flicking through again in search of something not too far removed, I found this one from David Mitchell’s ‘Black Swan Green’:

‘Listening to houses breathe makes you weightless.’

If you’re familiar with the six degrees of separation and the subsequent ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game where ‘the goal is to link any actor to Kevin Bacon through no more than six connections, where two actors are connected if they have appeared in a movie together’ then you’ll probably understand where I’m going with this.

Writing is in many respects a reflection of transition; the transition that a character undergoes through the story, the transitions in circumstance that move the plot forward, and even the changes of scenery can have an impact. Perhaps when we are short of ideas we can take two existing ideas in the form of quotations, and attempt to ‘fill in the gap’ between them, making the transition our story.

So here’s the challenge (after all the rambly explanatory stuff you didn’t really want to read): take two quotations (no more than a sentence long each) and write something that takes you from one to the other (bearing in mind that it helps if you choose two quotations written in the same tense), making sure that you credit the quotations to the original writers in your descriptions. And if you’re feeling particularly helpful, link it back to this page so that other people can have a go!

Here are a few from my notebook of quotations if you don’t know where to start:

‘You see yourself only in a mirror.’
The Kitchen God’s Wife – Amy Tan

‘One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn’t have to understand something to feel it.’
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

‘Silence was there with a loud rhythm.’
Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake

‘We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.’
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence


Good luck on breaking through those blocks!