For Those That Can't Stop Writing

Bran Locke hadn’t published a word in five years.

His debut novel, Ashes for Breakfast, had once flickered in the margins of literary acclaim—a gritty memoir disguised as fiction that earned him a cult following and a modest advance. But after the tour dried up, the interviews stopped, and his editor ghosted him, Bran retreated to a rent-controlled shoebox in Crown Heights where he spent most of his time battling half-finished drafts and the crushing silence of an indifferent world.

He was out of ideas, out of money, and out of coffee. And when he finally opened the cursed notebook he found at the back of a dusty thrift shop, he wasn’t looking for magic. He was just looking for a place to keep the screaming in his head organized.

The notebook was leather-bound and smelled like stale firewood. The pages had a faint shimmer, like they'd been soaked in oil and dried in the sun. There was no brand, no price tag, not even a "Made in" sticker. Just a handwritten sign above the shelf that read:

FOR THOSE WHO CAN’T STOP WRITING.

Bran chuckled. “Perfect.”

Entry One: Tuesday, 3:14 AM

"I wish the radiator would shut the hell up."

The words seemed to pulse as he wrote them. At first, he thought it was his eyes playing tricks. But then the clunking stopped. The rhythmic hissing that had punctuated his insomnia for years ceased. Silence. Real, honest silence.

Bran stared at the notebook.

He wrote again.

"The fridge is full of groceries."

A low hum filled the apartment. He shuffled to the kitchen. The light flicked on. Bran opened the fridge.

Eggs. Kale. Yogurt. Blueberries. Oat milk. Vegan sausage. Real sausage. Bottled cold brew. Everything he used to buy when he could afford to care.

He stood there a long time. Then he laughed so hard he cried.

That night, Bran wrote until sunrise.

In the following weeks, Bran transformed his life, one line at a time. He didn’t go wild with it—no lottery wins, no flying cars. He was methodical, like a surgeon. He fixed his teeth. Cleared his debt. Gave himself a six-figure book deal from a boutique imprint that "believed in him." He wrote his career back into motion. Respectably. Realistically.

And then came the real work. The novel.

It was called The Iron Year, a dark literary thriller about a city where emotions became laws and trauma turned people into weapons. It was weird. It was good. Bran hadn’t written like this since college—fluid, ferocious, possessed. The notebook didn’t just respond to wishes—it fueled the writing. As if the pages remembered what it was like to burn.

His agent called. Then his new editor. Then interviews. Op-eds. Opium den podcast invites. Twitter was all over him. “Locke’s back,” they said. “The savior of literary fiction.”

And then one morning, halfway through a sentence, the pen stopped.

Bran stared at the tip. Tried again. The ink flowed. He kept writing.

"The main character, Elijah, wakes up with a strange itch on his wrist."

Simple. Innocuous. A breadcrumb. He was about to keep going when he scratched his own wrist.

It itched. Exactly where he wrote it.

Bran put the pen down.

He didn’t write for two days.

He returned cautiously, writing only in the third person. No "I" or "me" or even "the author." Everything stayed on the page. Fictional. Clean.

But the itch returned.

So he experimented.

"A man with brown eyes and a fading scar on his left eyebrow finds a strange coin in his pocket."

He checked. There it was. A coin he didn’t recognize. Some foreign currency stamped with a spiral-eyed owl. Cold in his palm.

He wrote something darker.

"A stranger follows him home, their footsteps never matching his, always one beat late."

That night, someone followed him from the train. They vanished before he could turn and see.

It wasn’t just wishes anymore. His fiction was bleeding. Into the world. Into him.

So Bran did what any writer would do.

He kept writing.

He pushed The Iron Year into terrifying, beautiful territory. He crafted elaborate betrayals, invented a brutal new form of therapy that involved physical confrontation with your own memories, made New York City a place where the sun only rose for those who told the truth.

And everything he wrote, the world adopted.

At first it was subtle—new laws passed in New York about “emotive honesty.” A tech start-up offering "Memory Matches" where people could relive shared traumas in VR. A report that the sun hadn’t risen in Astoria for three days.

Bran watched the news with a kind of stunned horror. He wasn’t writing a book.

He was designing a reality.

And then came the first letter.

It was slipped under his door. Heavy parchment, wax seal, no address.

DO NOT WRITE ABOUT DEATH.

DO NOT WRITE ABOUT GODS.

DO NOT WRITE YOUR OWN NAME.

There was no signature.

Bran tried to laugh it off. Probably a prank. A viral marketing stunt.

But it rattled him.

He took a break. Read. Meditated. Tried to date again. It was hard when reality kept shifting every time he picked up a pen.

But he couldn’t stop. Not just because the notebook was addictive. But because the longer he went without writing, the more reality unraveled.

Streetlights blinked out. Whole train lines disappeared from the MTA map. People spoke in dialects no one remembered learning. A man on the 3 train asked Bran if he still remembered "how color used to feel."

Bran returned to the notebook.

But the rules weren’t enough.

Because here’s the catch:

Whatever he wrote into reality, something else vanished to make space.

Write food into your fridge? Forget your mother’s face.

Write a lover into your bed? Say goodbye to the memory of your first kiss.

Write a better world? Unmake the pieces that held the old one together.

The notebook never warned him. But reality did. Quietly. Sternly. Like a parent waiting for a child to notice the broken vase.

Bran finally saw it when he opened his browser and realized he couldn’t remember what year it was. Not because he forgot—but because no one knew. There was no date. Calendars just said “Now.” Archives were missing. History began and ended with whatever he hadn’t overwritten.

He stared at the notebook.

He could stop.

But if he did, the gaps would grow.

The world would fray at the seams.

So he made a choice.

He started a new story.

Entry One: "The Architect"

"There is a writer who discovers the power to shape the world with his words, but each sentence costs him something precious—memories, truths, pieces of the world’s foundation. The writer doesn’t know that he is not the first."

He paused.

He flipped the notebook back to the first page.

There were faint indentations beneath his own words. As if the pages had once been full, then emptied.

A sentence emerged as he tilted the paper under the desk lamp.

"He thought the notebook was his. He was wrong."

Another page. Another ghost sentence:

"Reality is not written by a single hand. It is fed. And the notebook is always hungry."

Bran kept writing. He wrote about the Architects—ancient beings who once shaped the universe with pure narrative. They split into factions:

The Sculptors, who refined reality with structure, logic, order.

The Dreamers, who unraveled it with chaos, possibility, emotion.

He wrote of their final war. Of the great forgetting. Of how they all wrote themselves out of existence.

He gave the world a history again. Anchored it with stories. But each addition dimmed something else. His reflection grew hazy. People on the street spoke languages he didn’t recognize. When he called his sister, she didn’t exist.

Then, one night, someone knocked on the door.

A woman in a red coat stood there. Her eyes shimmered with unwritten paragraphs.

"You’re collapsing too fast," she said.

Bran stared. "Who are you?"

"A Reader," she said. "The last one."

He tried to laugh. "There are no readers anymore."

"There are always readers," she said. "Just fewer writers. Most get eaten."

Bran swallowed. "Eaten by what?"

She nodded to the notebook. "You think that’s a tool. It’s not. It’s a mouth."

She stepped inside, picked up the notebook. Ran her fingers over the leather.

"It feeds on belief. Your belief. Your imagination. That’s the only real currency. Every story you write—it eats the unwritten ones. Every line consumes a possibility you’ll never know."

Bran sat. "So what do I do?"

She handed it back. "You stop feeding it. Or you feed it the only thing that can kill it."

"What?"

"Your ending."

Bran waited three days.

Then he walked the frayed streets. Children played with shadows that didn’t belong to them. Buildings whispered plot holes in the wind. The sky flickered between dusk and dawn like a dying projector.

He passed a bookstore boarded up with plywood etched in strange glyphs. A mural of a phoenix had been scrawled over with the word "REWRITE" in black ink. He lingered at a corner where an old man told stories to no one, his voice tangled with static.

He asked a woman with four irises if she remembered the moon. She stared at him, blinking out of sync. "It was edited out," she whispered.

Bran returned home.

He came back. Sat at his desk. Picked up the pen.

"The Ink That Eats Itself"

"There is a notebook that consumes reality with every word it accepts. It feeds on creativity, cannibalizes memory, and leaves behind a world stitched from the scraps of what could’ve been. But one writer, broken and brilliant, gives it something new: an ending."

Bran wrote the notebook’s death, not with fire or force, but with forgetting. He wrote a world that never needed it, where stories lived in people again. Where imagination wasn’t a weapon but a bridge.

He wrote the notebook closed.

As he finished, the notebook curled at the edges. Smoked. Shrunk. Folded in on itself until it was a single ink dot on the page.

Then—nothing.

Bran closed his eyes.

When he opened them, he was sitting at a blank desk.

No notebook. No apartment. No name.

Just a story in his head he couldn’t remember writing, and a feeling that something very old had finally been satisfied.

Somewhere, in the back of a dusty thrift shop, a shelf waits.

Above it, a sign reads:

FOR THOSE WHO CAN’T STOP WRITING.

And beside it, something flickers into view.

A single dot. Waiting to be written again.