Mornings in my world are spent teaching A/V to a bunch of bright-eyed teenagers in a rural high school that’s as small as it is full of character.
You might wonder what the scariest part of that routine is. For me, it’s the chill that runs down my spine when an administrator walks in mid-class to observe. But for the students? It’s the blank screen.
Not the work of making something. The screen before the work starts. That white void that just sits there and breathes at them.
They freeze. Even after they’ve worked up the nerve to sit down and open the software. Even after they’ve picked a topic. They’ll stare at a blank Premiere timeline or an empty Google Doc and just… stop. Paralyzed by all the ways the thing they’re about to make might not be good enough.
That’s the point where I drop my bombshell: I honestly don’t care what they put down.
The stares I get are something. Their faces say: are you serious, or are you just trying to trick us into working?
I’m serious. Here’s why.
The hardest part of any creative project isn’t the execution. It’s that first move from nothing to something. A blank page has infinite possibilities, which sounds exciting from a distance and is completely paralyzing up close. The moment you put anything on it — a bad sentence, a wrong cut, a crooked camera angle — you’ve already done the hardest thing. You’ve made it a page instead of a void.
This is where I’d normally hand them the “make a pot” story. My old composition professor had this line about Ming vases and functional pottery — the idea that not everything you make has to be great, and that making solid, technically correct work isn’t a failure. I’ve written about it before, and it’s basically the organizing metaphor for how I think about creative paralysis.
But there’s a wrinkle with students that makes this harder.
A working videographer who’s stuck can make a pot. They know the techniques. They can produce something technically solid even when inspiration isn’t showing up. My students often can’t yet — not because they’re less talented, but because they haven’t been taught the fundamentals yet. Asking a kid who’s never touched Premiere to make a pot is like telling someone to just swim when they haven’t had a lesson. The technique isn’t there to fall back on.
So instead of “make it technically solid,” I tell them: make it exist. Put anything on the page. A placeholder. A wrong word. A shaky rough cut. Something that proves the project is real and not just an idea in your head. Because once it exists, you’re not creating anymore — you’re editing. And editing is just identifying what’s wrong and fixing it. That part, humans are pretty good at.
The first draft isn’t the work. It’s the thing that makes the work possible.
Count how many students who froze in front of a blank screen have turned in finished projects by the end of the semester. Every single one. They all put something down first.
