Day 247 – Fear of the blank page

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Naked Truths: How to Overcome the Fear of the Blank Page (Without Actually Imagining Your Readers Undressed)

We’ve all heard the classic public speaking advice: “If you’re nervous, just picture the audience in their underwear.”

The logic goes that by reducing a room full of judging, critical humans down to their skivvies, they instantly lose their intimidating aura. Suddenly, you aren’t presenting to a board of directors or a room full of peers; you’re talking to a bunch of regular folks in polka-dot boxers and lace bralettes.

It’s silly, slightly absurd, and wildly ineffective for most people (mostly because picturing your boss in tighty-whities usually causes more anxiety, not less).

However, the psychology behind the trick is solid. It’s about reframing the power dynamic. It’s about stripping away the manufactured pressure of a situation to reveal the simple, human reality underneath.

So, how do we translate this concept to the writer’s ultimate nemesis: the fear of the blank page?

When facing a pristine, glowing white document, writers don’t usually fear the paper. They fear judgment. They fear failure. They fear that what they write won’t be smart, profound, or polished enough.

If you want to conquer the blank page, you need to strip it of its power. Here is how to apply the “underwear rule” to your writing process and finally start typing.

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1. Realize the Page Isn’t a Masterpiece Waiting to Happen (It’s Laundry)

When a blank page feels intimidating, it’s usually because we’ve put it on a pedestal. We treat the cursor like a spotlight and the first sentence like a literary legacy.

The Translation: Strip the page of its dignity.

Accept right now that your first draft is going to be messy, awkward, and poorly fitted—much like wearing mismatched underwear on laundry day. A blank page isn’t a marble slab waiting for a Michelangelo; it’s a dumping ground for half-formed thoughts. Give yourself permission to write absolute garbage. You cannot edit a blank page, but you can fix a terribly written paragraph.

2. Picture Your Reader as a Friend (Or Just a Person)

When we write, we often imagine an intimidating, anonymous crowd reading our work with crossed arms and red pens. We write for “The Internet,” “The Critics,” or “My High School English Teacher.”

The Translation: Strip your audience of their intimidating title.

Instead of imagining a faceless mob of critics, picture one specific, friendly person. Write an email to your best friend explaining the concept. Talk to your sibling. When you shift your mental audience from “The Public” to “One Individual,” the stakes instantly lower. You stop trying to sound like a textbook and start sounding like a human being.

3. Change What You’re Wearing (Digital Disguises)

Sometimes the environment contributes to the intimidation factor. Staring at a blinking cursor in a professional, stark-white word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs feels like sitting in the principal’s office.

The Translation: Change the aesthetic.

Just like dressing down changes your confidence, changing your writing environment can strip away the pressure.

• Use a distraction-free writing app with a dark mode (like Typora, Scrivener, or Ulysses) so the page isn’t glaring at you.
• Write your first draft in Comic Sans or a goofy font—it’s scientifically impossible to take a sentence seriously when it’s written in Comic Sans, which instantly kills your inner perfectionist.
• Write the first version by hand in a cheap notebook where mistakes don’t carry the finality of a digital delete key.

4. Write the “Unpublishable” Intro

The hardest part of any journey is the first step, and the hardest part of any article or story is the first sentence. We agonize over hooks, desperately trying to start with a bang.

The Translation: Start with a terrible warm-up.

Give yourself a rule: The first three sentences are not allowed to be good. Write intentionally bad sentences to break the ice.

• “I have no idea what I’m writing about right now, but my coffee is cold.”
• “This is going to be a really stupid article about writing.”

Once you break the silence of the page—even with nonsense—the spell is broken. You’ve crossed the threshold. Now you can delete the garbage intro and get to the real work.

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The Bottom Line

The fear of the blank page is just performance anxiety in disguise.

Just like public speaking, writing triggers our deepest insecurities about being seen and judged. But the next time you freeze up in front of a flashing cursor, remember the core lesson of the “underwear” trick: The things intimidating you only have power because you gave it to them.

Strip the page of its perfectionism. Strip the audience of their judgment. Stop waiting for the muse to show up in a three-piece suit, and start writing in your sweatpants.

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Day 246 – Are modern novels boring?

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Are Modern Novels Boring? (And How Do We Avoid the Literary Abyss)

Scroll through Goodreads, wander the aisles of a major bookstore, or tune into BookTok, and you’ll find a paradoxical landscape. We are currently living through a golden age of publishing volume. Yet, a nagging, heresy-sounding question is echoing among avid readers, critics, and writers alike:

Are modern novels… kind of boring?

It’s a controversial take. After all, thousands of brilliantly crafted, highly praised books hit the shelves every year. So why does a pervasive sense of literary fatigue seem to have gripped the reading public? Why do so many contemporary books feel like they were written by an algorithm, polished by a focus group, and designed to be consumed like fast food rather than savoured like a fine wine?

Let’s dive into the state of contemporary fiction, explore why modern novels sometimes feel like an uninspired trudge, and discover how readers can navigate past the noise to avoid the terrifying “literary abyss.”

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Part 1: Why Do Modern Novels Feel Boring?

To be clear, “boring” doesn’t necessarily mean slow. In fact, many modern novels move at a breakneck pace. Rather, the boredom stems from a sense of sameness, predictability, and a retreat from genuine artistic risk.

Here are the primary culprits turning contemporary fiction into a snooze-fest:

1. The Domestication of the Plot (The “Cozy” Trap)

In an effort to remain hyper-relatable and emotionally safe, a massive slice of modern literary fiction has retreated into the mundane. We are flooded with novels about contemporary people sitting in apartments, navigating micro-aggressions, having esoteric conversations about modern dating, and agonising over career pivots.

While everyday life can be profound, too many modern novels mistake triviality for depth. When every book is a quiet, low-stakes character study about upper-middle-class ennui, the genre begins to smell of stale coffee and self-absorption.

2. The Algorithmic Homogenization of Style

Publishing is a business, and businesses hate losing money. In the age of algorithmic marketing, publishing houses increasingly lean toward formulas that have worked before.

This has birthed a distinct “contemporary literary voice”: clean, hyper-accessible, emotionally explicit, and largely devoid of stylistic idiosyncrasies. Authors are often encouraged to write in a cinematic, easily translatable style that makes adaptation for Netflix or HBO effortless. Gone are the eccentric prose styles of the past; in their place is a bland, standardised English designed not to offend anyone’s palate.

3. “Show, Don’t Tell” Has Become “Explain Everything”

Good writing historically trusted the reader to read between the lines. Modern fiction, however, is terrified of ambiguity.

Influenced perhaps by the digital age’s demand for instant clarity, contemporary novels often hold the reader’s hand a little too tightly. Themes are spelled out explicitly in the dialogue. Characters give TED Talks to explain their internal psychology. When a book does all the emotional heavy lifting for you, the act of reading ceases to be a dynamic collaboration and becomes a passive lecture.

4. The Moralization of Art

Literature has always explored morality, but a growing trend in modern fiction is the demand that characters (and by extension, authors) pass strict contemporary ideological purity tests.

When novels become moral instruction manuals rather than explorations of human complexity, they lose their spark. Great literature thrives in the grey areas, the hypocrisies, and the moral ugliness of humanity. When every character has to be a pristine avatar of virtue—or an unambiguously cartoonish villain—the narrative tension evaporates.

---

Part 2: How to Spot a “Boring” Book Before You Buy

If you want to protect your reading time from the abyss of blandness, you need a radar system. Be wary of books that feature these red flags:

• The Over-caffeinated Blurb: If the back cover features quotes comparing the author to Joan Didion, Sally Rooney, and Ottessa Moshfegh all at once, you are likely looking at a manufactured trend, not an authentic voice.
• The High-Concept Gimmick: A book whose entire value proposition is a quirky premise (“What if an AI ran a coffee shop in a post-apocalyptic IKEA?”) but lacks stylistic prose or psychological depth.
• The Trauma-Drop: Books that rely on an early, shocking revelation of trauma to generate forced emotional stakes, while the rest of the prose coasts on cruise control.

---

Part 3: How Do We Avoid the Literary Abyss?

If you are suffering from reading fatigue, do not give up on reading altogether. You simply need to change your navigation strategy. Here is how you can step back from the brink of the literary abyss and fall in love with reading again.

1. Read Widely Across Time

There is an entire cemetery of brilliant literature out there waiting to be exhumed. If modern fiction feels flat, step back. Read the 19th-century Russians for sheer psychological depth; read the mid-century modernists for stylistic fireworks; read genre fiction from the 1970s and 80s that prioritised pure, unadulterated storytelling.

A healthy reading diet resembles a balanced ecosystem: mix the old with the new.

2. Seek Out Small Presses and Indie Publishers

While the Big Five publishers are increasingly risk-averse, independent presses (like Graywolf, Coffee House Press, New Directions, and Europa Editions) are taking massive artistic gambles.

Indie publishers are the lifeblood of contemporary literary innovation. They are printing translations of international authors, genre-bending experiments, and unapologetic prose that traditional houses won’t touch because they aren’t “marketable enough.”

3. Embrace Translation

American and British fiction often suffer from a specific cultural insularity. By looking outward and reading translated literature, you instantly escape the stylistic homogeneity of the Anglosphere.

Writers from South Korea, Argentina, Norway, Japan, and France bring entirely different philosophical frameworks, cultural rhythms, and narrative structures to the page. Reading translated works is the literary equivalent of taking off virtual reality goggles and seeing the real world for the first time.

4. Support Books That Take Risks

When you find an author who refuses to play it safe—someone who uses weird punctuation, writes unlikeable characters, tackles bizarre subjects, or structures a plot like a labyrinth—support them. Buy their books, recommend them to friends, and let publishers know that readers still reward audacity.

---

Conclusion: The Horizon is Still Bright

Are modern novels boring? Many of them are, yes. But boredom is simply a symptom of a bloated marketplace prioritising commercial safety over artistic peril.

The literary abyss is real, but it is entirely avoidable. By raising our standards, looking beyond the bestseller lists, and championing books with teeth, grit, and originality, we can push past the noise.

Great, vital, mind-altering books are still being written—we just have to be a little braver in how we look for them.

…

Day 246 – Are modern novels boring?

…

Are Modern Novels Boring? (And How Do We Avoid the Literary Abyss)

Scroll through Goodreads, wander the aisles of a major bookstore, or tune into BookTok, and you’ll find a paradoxical landscape. We are currently living through a golden age of publishing volume. Yet, a nagging, heresy-sounding question is echoing among avid readers, critics, and writers alike:

Are modern novels… kind of boring?

It’s a controversial take. After all, thousands of brilliantly crafted, highly praised books hit the shelves every year. So why does a pervasive sense of literary fatigue seem to have gripped the reading public? Why do so many contemporary books feel like they were written by an algorithm, polished by a focus group, and designed to be consumed like fast food rather than savored like a fine wine?

Let’s dive into the state of contemporary fiction, explore why modern novels sometimes feel like an uninspired trudge, and discover how readers can navigate past the noise to avoid the terrifying “literary abyss.”

---

Part 1: Why Do Modern Novels Feel Boring?

To be clear, “boring” doesn’t necessarily mean slow. In fact, many modern novels move at a breakneck pace. Rather, the boredom stems from a sense of sameness, predictability, and a retreat from genuine artistic risk.

Here are the primary culprits turning contemporary fiction into a snooze-fest:

1. The Domestication of the Plot (The “Cozy” Trap)

In an effort to remain hyper-relatable and emotionally safe, a massive slice of modern literary fiction has retreated into the mundane. We are flooded with novels about contemporary people sitting in apartments, navigating micro-aggressions, having esoteric conversations about modern dating, and agonizing over career pivots.

While everyday life can be profound, too many modern novels mistake triviality for depth. When every book is a quiet, low-stakes character study about upper-middle-class ennui, the genre begins to smell of stale coffee and self-absorption.

2. The Algorithmic Homogenization of Style

Publishing is a business, and businesses hate losing money. In the age of algorithmic marketing, publishing houses increasingly lean toward formulas that have worked before.

This has birthed a distinct “contemporary literary voice”: clean, hyper-accessible, emotionally explicit, and largely devoid of stylistic idiosyncrasies. Authors are often encouraged to write in a cinematic, easily translatable style that makes adaptation for Netflix or HBO effortless. Gone are the eccentric prose styles of the past; in their place is a bland, standardized English designed not to offend anyone’s palate.

3. “Show, Don’t Tell” Has Become “Explain Everything”

Good writing historically trusted the reader to read between the lines. Modern fiction, however, is terrified of ambiguity.

Influenced perhaps by the digital age’s demand for instant clarity, contemporary novels often hold the reader’s hand a little too tightly. Themes are spelled out explicitly in the dialogue. Characters give TED Talks to explain their internal psychology. When a book does all the emotional heavy lifting for you, the act of reading ceases to be a dynamic collaboration and becomes a passive lecture.

4. The Moralization of Art

Literature has always explored morality, but a growing trend in modern fiction is the demand that characters (and by extension, authors) pass strict contemporary ideological purity tests.

When novels become moral instruction manuals rather than explorations of human complexity, they lose their spark. Great literature thrives in the gray areas, the hypocrisies, and the moral ugliness of humanity. When every character has to be a pristine avatar of virtue—or an unambiguously cartoonish villain—the narrative tension evaporates.

---

Part 2: How to Spot a “Boring” Book Before You Buy

If you want to protect your reading time from the abyss of blandness, you need a radar system. Be wary of books that feature these red flags:

• The Over-caffeinated Blurb: If the back cover features quotes comparing the author to Joan Didion, Sally Rooney, and Ottessa Moshfegh all at once, you are likely looking at a manufactured trend, not an authentic voice.
• The High-Concept Gimmick: A book whose entire value proposition is a quirky premise (“What if an AI ran a coffee shop in a post-apocalyptic IKEA?”) but lacks stylistic prose or psychological depth.
• The Trauma-Drop: Books that rely on an early, shocking revelation of trauma to generate forced emotional stakes, while the rest of the prose coasts on cruise control.

---

Part 3: How Do We Avoid the Literary Abyss?

If you are suffering from reading fatigue, do not give up on reading altogether. You simply need to change your navigation strategy. Here is how you can step back from the brink of the literary abyss and fall in love with reading again.

1. Read Widely Across Time

There is an entire cemetery of brilliant literature out there waiting to be exhumed. If modern fiction feels flat, step back. Read the 19th-century Russians for sheer psychological depth; read the mid-century modernists for stylistic fireworks; read genre fiction from the 1970s and 80s that prioritized pure, unadulterated storytelling.

A healthy reading diet resembles a balanced ecosystem: mix the old with the new.

2. Seek Out Small Presses and Indie Publishers

While the Big Five publishers are increasingly risk-averse, independent presses (like Graywolf, Coffee House Press, New Directions, and Europa Editions) are taking massive artistic gambles.

Indie publishers are the lifeblood of contemporary literary innovation. They are printing translations of international authors, genre-bending experiments, and unapologetic prose that traditional houses won’t touch because they aren’t “marketable enough.”

3. Embrace Translation

American and British fiction often suffer from a specific cultural insularity. By looking outward and reading translated literature, you instantly escape the stylistic homogeneity of the Anglosphere.

Writers from South Korea, Argentina, Norway, Japan, and France bring entirely different philosophical frameworks, cultural rhythms, and narrative structures to the page. Reading translated works is the literary equivalent of taking off virtual reality goggles and seeing the real world for the first time.

4. Support Books That Take Risks

When you find an author who refuses to play it safe—someone who uses weird punctuation, writes unlikeable characters, tackles bizarre subjects, or structures a plot like a labyrinth—support them. Buy their books, recommend them to friends, and let publishers know that readers still reward audacity.

---

Conclusion: The Horizon is Still Bright

Are modern novels boring? Many of them are, yes. But boredom is simply a symptom of a bloated marketplace prioritizing commercial safety over artistic peril.

The literary abyss is real, but it is entirely avoidable. By raising our standards, looking beyond the bestseller lists, and championing books with teeth, grit, and originality, we can push past the noise.

Great, vital, mind-altering books are still being written—we just have to be a little braver in how we look for them.

…

Day 245 – Vivid Descriptions

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What Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon Teaches Us About Plotting and Vivid Description

When we talk about the titans of American crime fiction, one name towers above the rest: Dashiell Hammett. Before Raymond Chandler gave us poetic metaphors, and long before modern thriller writers cluttered pages with convoluted twists, Hammett stripped the genre down to its bone and sinew.

At the centre of his legacy is The Maltese Falcon (1930). Beyond its status as the quintessential noir novel, The Maltese Falcon is a masterclass in two distinct literary arts: exemplary plotting and vivid, objective description.

If you are a writer looking to sharpen your craft, or simply a lover of brilliant storytelling, Hammett’s seminal work offers invaluable lessons. Let’s dive into the anatomy of The Maltese Falcon and explore what we can learn from the man who revolutionised modern fiction.

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1. The Power of the Objective Eye (Vivid Description Through Action)

Many aspiring writers believe that “vivid description” means loading a paragraph with purple prose, elaborate metaphors, and sweeping adjectives. Hammett proves the exact opposite.

As a former operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, Hammett wrote what he knew. His descriptions are rooted in strict realism. He doesn’t tell us how a character feels; he shows us how they move, how they dress, and how they react to their environment.

The Iconic Introduction of Sam Spade

Look at how Hammett introduces his protagonist, private investigator Sam Spade, in the opening pages:

“Spade’s blondish gray hair was cut short, made his head-top look like a rose-bush with the blossoms clipped off. Eyes-yellow-gray—were small and wary. His chin prominent and hard… He sat reading a newspaper with a hard-boiled unconcern.”

Notice what’s missing? There is no deep internal monologue explaining Spade’s moral ambiguity. Instead, Hammett uses concrete, sharp imagery—”hard,” “wary,” “blossoms clipped off”—to paint a picture that lets the reader’s imagination do the heavy lifting.

What We Can Learn:

• Show, Don’t Preach: Let your characters’ physical traits and micro-actions reveal their inner psychology.
• Precision Over Poetry: Choose nouns and verbs that pack a punch. Instead of saying a room was messy, describe the exact placement of the half-empty highball glass and the unread mail.
• Behavior as Characterization: Hammett understood that in high-stakes environments, people reveal themselves through posture, tics, and glances, not soliloquies.

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2. The Architecture of Exemplary Plotting

A common trap in genre fiction is the “plot maze”—where authors add twists just to confuse the reader, resulting in a narrative that collapses under its own weight. The Maltese Falcon avoids this by treating its plot like a piece of precision machinery. Every scene moves the ball forward, and every character has a distinct, driving motivation.

The plot kicks off when Brigid O’Shaughnessy (disguised as “Miss Wonderley”) walks into Spade’s office with a lie. From that moment, a chain reaction of greed is set in motion, drawing in a colourful rogues’ gallery: Kasper Cairo, Joel Cairo, and the ominous Kasper Gutman (the “Fat Man”).

They are all hunting the elusive, jewel-encrusted black bird. But the falcon itself is famously a MacGuffin—an object that drives the plot forward while ultimately holding no intrinsic value.

What We Can Learn:

• Character-Driven Plotting: Hammett doesn’t force his characters to do unnatural things just to make a plot twist work. The plot is an inevitable collision course driven by greedy, desperate people all chasing the same prize.
• Master the MacGuffin: Give your characters a focal point of desire, but remember that the pursuit of the object is always more interesting than the object itself. The tension comes from the shifting alliances and betrayals among the hunters.
• Tight Causality: In a well-plotted story, Scene A must lead directly to Scene B, connected by either “therefore” or “but”—never “and then.” Hammett ensures that every lie told and every body dropped has immediate consequences for Sam Spade.

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3. The Enigma of the Protagonist (Ambiguity is Magnetic)

Traditional heroes up to that point were often clear-cut champions of good. Sam Spade shattered that mold. He is sleeping with his late partner’s wife, he is mercenary about his fees, and at the end of the novel, he turns the woman he loves (and desires) over to the police because, as he tells her, “I’m not going to play the sap for you.”

Hammett teaches us that a protagonist doesn’t need to be likable to be compelling. They need to have a code. Spade’s code isn’t about traditional morality; it’s about professional pride and survival in a corrupt world.

What We Can Learn:

• Embrace Moral Grey Areas: Flawed protagonists are infinitely more relatable and realistic than paragons of virtue.
• Define Your Character’s Code: Even if your character is a scoundrel, they must have lines they refuse to cross. This creates internal tension and reader loyalty.

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Final Takeaway: Read Hammett Like a Blueprint

Dashiell Hammett didn’t just write pulp detective stories; he wrote literature that exposed the anxieties of modern life through the lens of crime.

By studying The Maltese Falcon, writers can learn how to strip away narrative fat. Through vivid, objective descriptions, you can ground your readers in reality, and through rigorous, cause-and-effect plotting, you can keep them turning the pages late into the night.

The falcon may have been a fake, but the lessons Dashiell Hammett left behind are the real deal.

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Are you a fan of classic noir? What is your favorite Dashiell Hammett novel? Let us know in the comments below!

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