“Blank Space” is one of the only songs I’ve ever written that I started out writing as a complete joke. I think, as a songwriter, you have to be pretty well-aware of who you are as a person, but then I think you also have to have one eye on what people think of you and kind of what the general perception is of you out in the world. And, in the last couple of years, I noticed there has been sort of a pretty sensational fictionalization of my personal life. You know, they’ve kind of drawn on this profile of this girl who is a serial dater, jet-setting around with all her boyfriends and she can get them, but she can’t keep them because she’s too emotional and she’s needy. Then, she gets her heart broken because they leave, so she goes to her evil lair and writes songs about it for revenge. It’s just kind of this very complex profile of a person. I got to thinking about it and I started to think about how interesting that character is. If she were a real person who had all these qualities and attributes, what song would she write? And I’m pretty sure it would sound a little like this.

— Via Yahoo! Live.

Swift explained to GQ in October 2015:

Some of the things I write about on a song like ‘Blank Space’ are satire. You take your creative license and create things that are larger than life. You can write things like ‘I get drunk on jealousy, but you’ll come back each time you leave, ’cause, darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream.’ That is not my approach to relationships. But is it cool to write the narrative of a girl who’s crazy but seductive but glamorous but nuts but manipulative? That was the character I felt the media had written for me, and for a long time I felt hurt by it. I took it personally. But as time went by, I realized it was kind of hilarious.

Swift told Yahoo in November 2014:

It’s interesting when you put out a song with sort of a comedic element to it. People with different senses of humor perceive it differently. You’ll have people who completely get the joke and they’re saying, ‘Oh, look, she’s completely taken back the narrative, and she’s singing from the perspective of the person the media paints her to be.“ And then other people will be listening to it on the radio and thinking, "I knew it! I knew she was crazy!’ […] It was sort of a risk for me to even take it into the studio and play this idea for Max Martin and Shellback and say, ‘Hey, I want to write this completely satirical song about the fictionalization of my personal life, and just kind of poke fun at it.’ The fact that it ended up being a sort of shining spot on the album is really exciting for me.