TheBanyanTree: the snickering and taunting blank page

[A. Christopher Hammon]

Over the past few days I have been doing my best to stare down a blank 
page and fill it up with some meaningful words. I should just tell 
stories, it is what I do best. But instead I am trying to write about 
the influence of the way we tell our stories for an academic audience.

For years I have been talking about the power of how we tell our future 
stories, the influence that dominate voice with which we tell those 
stories has on choices that we make in the present. One of my teachers 
in grad school thirty years ago called my attention to this and through 
the years I've noticed a significant correlation between how we tell our 
future stories--a feared future, a cynical future, or a preferred and 
hopeful future--and how we live the present. It is an interesting 
correlation.

As a cancer patient exploring how best to live with a cancer that is not 
going away, I have been listening to a lot of stories from cancer 
patients over the past few years, especially the ones that we celebrate 
as heroic in their journeys with cancers that eventually bring an end to 
life. They tell preferred future stories given the gravity of their 
realities.

So writing an article on the power of how we tell our future stories 
should be a piece of cake, the kind of thing that I knock out in a 
morning and turn over to my editor. The blank page on my screen snickers 
and taunts. I pound my keys. I follow the advice to write from my heart. 
I pause and look at what is there. The page snickers and taunts. I use 
some of my best Navy vocabulary and the page just laughs.

I started the piece back the beginning of February. I had just finished 
teaching a seminar on palliative care from a patient's perspective that 
used a number of the articles I've written about my journey with cancer. 
I talked about hope and future stories and the participants all said 
they wanted that article. So I set out to write. The blank page 
snickered and laughed. I've just finished teaching that seminar again to 
another group. Same thing and the blank page just snickered and laughed.

Since I teach leadership as well as directing an educational non-profit, 
I've seen this influence at the organizational level as well as 
individual. I have plenty of stories to tell about how organizations 
tell their stories. As soon as cash flow stalls amid cultural changes or 
economic shifts, boards often go immediately to their feared future 
stories: the sky is falling and doomed are we because a bus is going to 
fall on us and squish us. Or the more positive shrug their shoulders and 
proclaim there is nothing we can do about it. If the bus falls on us, 
the bus falls on us. Then there are those few that set out to identify 
what they are going to do to adapt to new realities in light of their 
preferred outcomes for the future. Lots of stories, but which ones can I 
tell in writing. The now cluttered page snickers and laughs.

Alas. As Anne Lamott, one of my writing heroes, might say, some days we 
just pour words out on the page knowing that we'll look at those pages 
tomorrow morning in hopes of finding maybe a sentence that we'll keep.

The page on the screen snickers, laughs, and invites me to play again. 
And so I shall, but for now, I'm going to go watch a baseball game.

Cheers,
Chris