A Write of Passage

What do you write when there's nothing to write? I remember once having a writing assignment in high school. The teacher showed us a picture, a landscape I believe, and asked us to write what it made us think about. It didn't make me think of anything. I turned in a blank page and took a zero. Perhaps this said that I had no imagination. Or perhaps it said that I didn't feel like playing this particular game. But truth was it didn't do anything for me. Maybe if she had shown us Van Gogh's Starry Night or a Dali or Blake, I could have responded. Later I would probably just have played the game. That's what I did for my career in journalism. I played the game, I got paid. I didn't turn in a blank page. I learned that sometimes what you write about when you have nothing to write about is the fact that you have nothing to write about. Professional writers do this. It's called making a living.