Step 1: The blank page is a hallway that contains an infinite number of doors. When I sit down to write, I am inside a blank page of unopened doors. Writing is putting pen to paper and opening one of the doors. If putting the pen to paper is an act of creation, it should always be pushing the brink of what is known. What constrains an act of creation? Creation is constrained by the need to make a decision. I must choose a door.

Step 2: Behind each door lives a vista of secret ideas. The ideas are shelved in rows, like embryos, suspended in a liquid of formaldehyde. My hand touches each curious jar as I pass. The ideas are asleep in jars, waiting for someone to open them. An idea comes to the mind unformed. To be complete, it requires construction. Because each idea is alive, its construction must be physical. In the physical process of constructing, a tension is borne; the tension of preserving the present state of the idea and the imposition upon it of a future form. 

Preservation of the Present—because creation requires hunger. And hunger is physical. The symbol of the Uroboros devours itself to satiate its own hunger. It circles upon itself to consume its own tail because all else has already been devoured. Nothing exists outside of itself, not even time. Not even hunger. It is all hunger. It is all satiability. It is all force.

Imposition of the Future— because a form requires a framework. A needed foresight lends a structural integrity to the idea necessary for… stability. When the framework is stable, the idea doesn’t need to be upheld by the artist—it can sustain itself. A work of art with a weak framework, like a house of cards, will collapse in the first wind, or even worse, will not ascend at all. The construction of an idea is reached by building it in steps. It is arrived at through the process of ascension. 

Step 3: I find myself again a wanderer in a hallway of unopened doors. Each word, each phrase, each possibility, is a reflection of a door I’ve encountered before. A lone phrase tolls like clockwork in my mind: “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” You’re dying….you’re dying…Is it the fear of dying that drives me to write on?— without foresight, without passion, without commitment? I fear making the wrong choice. I fear getting the timing wrong. I fear breaking what I am now holding in my hands; I fear looking down and seeing my hands empty. 

Step 4: The act of building is physical. The present is in tension with the future, but I recall that the future is already here, for it inflames my present hunger. The act of creation exists outside of time, but its solution is chronological. Like the Uroboros, the writer turns to herself for nourishment, for she has nowhere else to turn. 

I am in the hallway of secret doors, and I turn the handle of my chosen door. What I see before me is a curving staircase.

Step 5: Writing is always pushing the brink of what is known. What constrains the act of writing? It is constrained by the writer’s position. To see further, my writing must be able to sustain my human form.