Understanding the Whiteboard Genre

If the medium is the message, then perhaps an empty markerboard says all it needs to. And yet I'm drawn to writing on it much the way I long to fill up the white Broadway of a Word document or a blank sheet of paper. Blank space is foreplay for the writer; I could take the analogy farther, in the male desire to fill a void, but can't without straying into Updikean lust. Better to say that a blank blogspot for the blogger is like the morning and "the act of beginning to write in the morning never loses its pleasure" as John Updike wrote. He also said that "in the morning light one can write breezily, without the slightest acceleration of one's pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God." True enough, although I would slightly amend the great one's prose to: "In the morning light, or with the aid of Guinness, one can write breezily..."

The desire to write the Great Midwestern Novel, or more precisely, the Great Central-Ohio-North-of-Interstate-70 novel, is hardwired into me despite my general preference for non-fiction in my reading and writing. I think it's due in part to the influence of living in a world that only values reality, where reality is defined in narrow, hyper-rationalistic terms. But the yearning lingers even though the problem with the markerboard is that it's a medium that doesn't lend itself to novels. For one thing there is the space limitation. I don't think I could get more than 3,000 legible words on it. For another, the audience for the whiteboard is expecting something soundbyte-y or pictorial. For example, here is a co-worker's pluperfect use of markerboard:

Yes I do have a bit of "markerboard envy", even though he did admit he stole the idea off a website. That seems dirty pool, does it not?

Another worker, nearing retirement, has a simple sequence of sentences:

80 months till:

retirement?

nursing home?

stay at _______'s?

No $$ left, too much Vegas?

The "_______" is a variable and is occasionally filled in by rogue markerboarders volunteering the home of a fellow colleague.