La page blanche — The Blank Page

Writer's Block and the Writing Workshop

Le syndrome de la page blanche, the blank-page syndrome, is a familiar phrase in French for writer's block, and it is as common among students writing a thesis as among novelists. The advice in this lesson is widely shared by teachers of writing: separate drafting from editing, write by hand or without the possibility of deleting, set a short time limit, and allow a first version to be bad. Ateliers d'écriture, creative-writing workshops, are popular in France. They are run in libraries, community centers, bookshops, schools and universities, often on weekday evenings, and usually work with constraints: a first line to continue, a word to include, a time limit. The tradition owes something to the writers of the Oulipo, the group founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, later joined by Georges Perec, who made constraint a source of creativity. For academic writing, many universities offer writing support for graduate students, including retreats where students write together in silence for a few days, a practice that has spread widely. Writing the last sentence first, as Camille suggests, is one of many techniques for giving a text its direction.