When I have come up with the story and the character, I start writing, I am willing, I am expecting, I am wishing for the moment to gather the words that I need to make this real on the page. To make this real in the imagination of my readers. Because when I write it, I don’t read it, I just write it. I try to be the reader, but I am not the actual reader. I am myself, the creator of that thing. So what I am trying to do is get the words, the specific words, to create the exact world I want to create for them.’ (Milena)
In moving, or rather being moved, from the point of idea to writing, Milena is faced with a new challenge: drawing her ideas out in words. Milena explains the process of writing as such: she encounters an idea in her daily life; the idea provokes writing; she, the writer, imagines how her writing reaches a reader; the imagined reader, ideally, envisions the world from the text. The
reader as conceived in the mind of the writer is an important factor in the creation of the text not just an active recipient. It is the idea that compels the writer to write, but it is the idea of a reader that shapes how a writer writes. The need to communicate to the unknown reader, or the known reader in the workshop, dictates how a text must look; as soon as writing starts, the concept of reader has a presence, alongside the writer, at every stage of creation.
Milena was not the only writer to depict the act of writing as a process of waiting or struggling. La pagina blanca, ‘the blank page’ is one example of the struggle faced by many writers I worked with as they navigate using words to make the transition from idea to articulation. As suggested by Milena’s quote above, it is in the act of writing that the writer begins to consider ‘the reader’ with regard to their work, and it is at this point that ‘communication’ seems to become a concern. As quoted above, for Milena, the prospect of conveying the output of her ideas, the story and the characters, and making them ‘real in the imagination of [her] readers’ becomes her goal. As she reiterated and clarified for me in a later conversation, ‘words are just words on a page if you are not able to put them together to make the world, make the picture… if not doing that, you are doing nothing’. That said, the role of ‘the reader’ or the audience in this capacity is quite limited,
representing a sounding board, a ‘model reader’. It is mostly not until the editing phase in the
talleres that most of the writers encounter their first audience.
All of the writers I worked with spoke to me about the pagina blanca, something I also feel aware of as a writer. Raúl told me that it is such a universal problem, they often taught techniques to overcome it as a part of the curriculum at the Centro Formación Onelio Jorge Cardoso (el Onelio) where he taught. Sitting one morning in his office at the writing school, Raúl explained to me how he begins writing when he needs to. As noted in the previous chapter, Raúl uses his desk at el Onelio
to write, as he struggles to write at home. The feeling of not writing during the times reserved for writing seemed very stressful. In that sense, the moments of dealing with la pagina blanca could be miserable. He had to write when he had time; he could not walk away. In that moment, Raúl articulated how passionately he felt about facing writers’ block.
He rested one arm on his knee, in a slight hunch, and the other arm waved around occasionally in the air, seemingly flicking away thoughts in a direct comparison to Milena’s tendency to grab at them. He spoke quietly, clearly, and slowly for me, knowing that it would be
much easier to follow than the slang of fast-paced, Cuban Spanish that I was used to from my other colleagues and typical to the workshop meetings. He told me, ‘I think the only way that I have to write is to pass a time in total torture in front of the blank page, which I consider totally
excruciating and I don’t want it and I make excuses not to start or continue the work’. To escape the desire to run away from the writing, he forces himself forward by playing with words in general or even playing with the act of storytelling, narrating his life into the plot. He said:
But many times la pagina blanca inspires me to set aside the difficulty with a type of game. A game could be, for example, words that I pick randomly in a dictionary that I have to insert into a paragraph of a story that I am working on. That would be a game. Or as a game, I am going to involve myself within the writing and I begin to enjoy myself. It takes a lot of work to begin after long periods, but I take the thread of the reality that I already live. I will write that this fucked me over and made me a distressed man. And it is for this that I am living within what I write. I am always thinking of this reality, but it is a specific state and if I can excite myself with what I am writing then… I soon see there is a moment in which I get goose bumps reading it. “Enough,” I say, “I am going down a good path.” Or I mean “Enough of the game, I am writing well.” This is what I like. But I think that the main difficulty for me is to capture the tone when I write.
He went on to tell me that these are techniques he teaches. Many of the writers I worked with studied under Raúl at the Centre and spoke about employing similar tactics.
Milena also spoke about being sucked into the world of her narration through the games she played to overcome writers’ block. She told me, writing is ‘a complex process of playing with words. You are playing, but when you finish writing, you are just a part of the game. Not the gamer, just another tool of the game [el juego]’. She continues, ‘words, for me, are alive, like animals, savages.’ For Milena and Raúl it seems that the struggle to write, or the stress behind la pagina blanca, centres on the problem of moving from the world of ideas, the writer’s imagination, to the page (in the case of Raúl) or to the envisaged imagination of the prospective reader via the savage and inept medium of words (in the case of Milena). The pain centres on the act of communication and the struggle to mould words clearly from ideas and thoughts, or the imagination of the writer, to the imagination of the reader. This act of communication is integral in the way in which writing
is considered successful and, I would argue, governed by a set of expectations of invention articulated in the talleres by group members and by Raúl.