Here’s how it’s done. First, you take a blank sheet of paper. Choose your side, carefully. So what if it’s blank, and equally white on both sides, there are always differences to the discerning eye.

     How to see this difference? Easy, close your eyes, run your fingers over one side, then the other. Turn it over, then turn it again and again and again until you open your eyes and there’s one of two answers. The side facing you feels right. If not, it’s the other side.

     Now you’re almost ready.

     Pen, pencil, your choice. Such individual things, writing instruments. Think of Shakespeare, by the light of the window overhanging the Thames on the Southwark side, with his quill. A fine feather to dip the sharpened end into the ink well, dark ink, sunlight reflected off the surging tidal waters, blank page, ready. Now you too are the same, ready.

    Write.

     The business of a writer is with the blank page and the pen. The page waits patiently, going nowhere. Not yet ready, but not going anywhere, yet. That’s up to you. You are the one who puts the words on the page and then, only then, sends the page on its way. Once the page is on its way it is out of your hands. Where it goes and how it’s received when it arrives there, that’s nothing to do with you. Let your pages fly, watch a little. Walk away, ponder, choose more paper, pen, ink.

     Write, again. Write what?

     You may well ask. Does it matter?

     To you it’s a yes, but you’ll never know how much, or how little, it matters to someone else. I always like the first thing comes into my head. I can write about that, not knowing what will come next and so the journey of the ink across the page begins.

     When my father was a boy in school, long ago and far away, he would catch a spider and dip it in his inkwell. When the spider wandered over someone’s writing page eight legs trailed an inky path across the white paper.

     What would you make of such a page falling from the sky? That’s the sort of thing I mean.

     You see, if you were walking down the street and a paper plane, silently and gracefully, came from nowhere and you could see writing on part of it, what would you do?

     I write “If you argue with someone else do you really think you are changing their point of view to yours?  Do You Really Think That?”

     I write “What is stopping you?”

     I write “You are in a film and the next scene begins now.”

     I write “Turn, walk away, take the next left, then the next right, toss a coin, heads you go right, tails you go left and follow that direction. Remember what happens.”

     I write, “Hello, it’s so good to see you smile.”

     Until I put pen to paper, I never know what I will write, yet I always know when to stop.

     Artists apply paint, charcoal, pencil, ink too, to their chosen surface. I’ve often wondered how do they know when to stop? How does the artist know that the next brush stroke is the last one and that then, only then, is the image complete?

     I do know when it’s time to stop writing and prepare the page for flight. Long practise since I was young has made the making of paper planes second nature.

     Everyone has different styles and that’s as it should be. Write something, pen down, follow your fingers make yours. Now you are ready.

     I like to go to different places, but I do have favourites, one above all.

     In my town there is a multi-storey car park giving a view of Tudor chimneys sitting atop Georgian roofs, beside Edwardian shops framed by Medieval battlements of the Castle in the background. Even better, four streets and one laneway meet below, unseen air currents catch my planes and blow them hither and thither in random circuits.

      I hope one day to have paper planes land at my feet, one fine day.

The End

The fine people at The Fiction Factory liked this story and even described it as “charming”

Hope you like it too.