Reedsy Does It

There just aren’t the words.

They’re nowhere.

Which is a problem.

I enjoy writing stories. I would say I always have, but that’s not strictly true. As a teenager and through university, I wrote regularly. It was fun. And then it stopped.

        I never intended to stop writing, but for a number of years I did. Almost completely. There’d be a few jottings here or there, but nothing that could be considered a piece, whether a story or an article or a poem or whatever. I simply stopped writing.

        I think I always told myself it was temporary, that I’d get back into it soon enough. And then years passed. They do that. You turn your back on a year and it’ll sneak out on you and take a piece of your money and your life with it. Even some of your hair if you don’t protect it.

        And then a decade passed.

        Jesus.

        What was happening?

But then, towards the end of last year, shortly after moving into a new apartment, I found that everything I’d written back then was gone. Lost. It had all been saved on floppy disks. That’s right, 3 ½ inch floppy disks. Not that I have a floppy disk drive anymore anyway, but that’s not the point.

So, having not gotten around to writing anything for some years, I sat down one night, the place still feeling somewhat alien, with a resolution, and I started to write.

I was amazed how easily it came to start with. I guess all those years of inactivity had been stockpiling words bit by bit inside me and now it was time for me to turn the faucet. I found myself sitting up all night, typing and typing and hand writing when I wasn’t typing. I was having a great time.      

        I told myself I had to write something every day. No argument. I had a lot of wasted time to make up for. To be honest though, I didn’t believe I’d have the discipline.

        How I underestimated myself.

        By February, I’d completed a sizeable number of poems and even more stories, as well as a couple of pieces I couldn’t really give a name to. And this didn’t include the haikus or the limericks or various other weird little things. There were also countless half written drafts, of course. There always are.

Now though, I didn’t know what to do besides writing the words. I asked an old friend who I hadn’t spoken to for years.

        “You’re doing some writing?” he asked. “It’s about time.”

        Which felt reassuring.

        I’d known him since university, and he’d always had this idea that I’d write screenplays and he’d make the movies. It didn’t work out that way, of course, but now he was working as a teacher of film theory at a small university. He didn’t like the word lecturer, he thought it sounded less personal somehow.

        He said he’d be willing to ask some of his colleagues in the literature department what to do, but he recommended that I just turn to the internet, that purveyor of all things true and not so true. He did, however, get back to me a few days later with a number of websites to look at.

        One of these sites, amongst other things, held a weekly writing contest, for which they supplied prompts that hopeful writers had to respond to. This seemed promising, so I signed up.

Since then, I’ve been submitting to this site relatively regularly. The idea of writing to other peoples’ prompts, not always doing whatever I felt like, has been an interesting addition to my hobby. I’ve written lots of different stories, some of which I’m pleased with and some… well… the less said, the better. I have no great opinion about the words, but I enjoy making them, which is the point, I guess. And I’ve been trying to find time, even when I’m busy. I’ve had times when I’ve just sat down and thought “what the hell,” and started typing, seeing what would happen, and an hour later I have a story there ready to submit. It’s quite a feeling. 

        I kept up my promise to myself of doing something every day and, by late June, I had amassed more than two hundred completed stories and a hundred poems. I was also well into a number of longer pieces. How long, I had no idea, but they were already pushing, or maybe past, the boundaries of what could be classed as a short story. I felt great. I’d sit up early into the morning, listening to music and typing, and then just as I was cleaning my teeth before bed, at maybe 3:30, an idea would suddenly click into place and I’d run back to my laptop.

        “Have you been sleeping ok? You look tired,” my mum told me one weekend during a Skype call.

        “Really?” I asked. “I’ve never felt better.”

        It was true.

        Stress.

        Tension.

        Anxiety.

        Goodbye to you all!

And then something happened.

I was shortlisted for the weekly prize. This hadn’t happened before. It caught me off guard.

        It was a story I’d written quickly. It had come from a vague idea I’d had, just a single image, and unfolded at a greater speed than I could type it.

        I was surprised to see it shortlisted and then, of course, disappointed it didn’t win.

        I’d never thought about winning before. Seriously. The contest had given me a new twist on my story writing, and had made it more fun, trying to fit somebody else’s rules or ideas into what I was doing was adding a whole new dynamic to my fun. But once you get shortlisted, of course you start to think about the big prize. How could you not?

        I’m not a competitive person. I never have been. Even as a kid, I didn’t care so much if I won or lost, I just wanted to have fun. So, whatever. Being shortlisted was a nice feeling, but I didn’t think of it as anything more than that at the time.

And then…

        I’ve been sitting here trying to think what to write for the latest prompt. Trying to figure out a story to tell. Only nothing seems to be coming. I sit, as always, with an open word document and an open notepad, and beside that a few Ikea pencils. You know, the stubby little things they leave for you in the shop so you can write down shelf numbers to collect your items at the end. I like these pencils. I don’t know why, but I feel like my wrist doesn’t seize up so much when I write with these. Probably that’s just my imagination though.

        Truth be told, though, I don’t like Ikea. Actually, that’s an understatement. I hate Ikea. It’s hell on Earth. There are no staff to help you, and the place is full of children tearing around unsupervised, screaming and jumping on things. And the food… people make such a thing about the food, but it just tastes like school dinners. The fact that I have so many of these pencils just shows how many times I’ve managed to survive hell.

        But I digress.

        I’m all set up and ready to go. The night has come in. The cat’s curled up on his favourite shelf. I have a mug of Milo. I’m playing Boards of Canada. Everything seems set. Only, nothing happens.

        This is the first time this has happened.

        On Saturday, it didn’t seem like a thing. Hell, it’s nice to take a rest on Saturday and recharge the mind. Maybe do some reading, watch a few movies, cook something nice, and a crumble for dessert. With apple and mixed berries. Winner. Old school Jean Claude Van Damme, or even better Jackie Chan. Something with lots of fighting and not enough story to require attention. And then later, maybe go for a classic. Something by Gilliam perhaps. Maybe Alex Cox, because it’s been a while. Unwind. Forget about it. And if this overlaps into Sunday, so be it. I have a few donuts, and the coffee machine, the day’s set. No need to worry about the words, they’ll come.

        And then the week begins. Such as it is. Monday drags as it is wont to do. While eating lunch, I watch music videos on YouTube. I even turn to the Boomtown Rats at one point. I know this isn’t the real meaning of the song, but that’s ok. I eat slowly. The leftovers from Sunday night. Curry tastes better the next day anyway.

There have been reasons for me not writing in the past; I’m lazy, I’m tired, I’m busy with one thing or the other. Life gets in the way, whether it’s work or family or friends or whatever. But I’ve never had no ideas before.

And it gets worse.

Before I know it, I start to worry about genre and characterisation. What is this?

I want to make sure I have exactly the right characters before I start. Who do people want to read about, and how can I make them even better? I find myself stuck in a fog of form and theme. Should I use a twist? Or is it better not to? Perhaps set up for a twist and then whip the rug out from under it, the twist being that there is none. Should I give the plot through dialogue or narration? And how much of it should I give?

I don’t do this. It is new to me. I let things unfold as they wish. I wrote a story recently which I thought was going to be slapstick comedy. I was thinking of the Three Stooges as I wrote it. Only when I finished, I realised it had become a horror story. I think. I don’t really care for genre. If a story is good, it is good. So why am I so hung up now? Why am I trying to decide what genre to work in before I even have an idea?

Monday drags into Tuesday and Tuesday drains away, the dregs circling the drain with scraps of hair and of hope.

         I wake on Wednesday with 911 is A Joke stuck in my head. It’s with me while I make breakfast and I sit down with it to check the news. Hit me! I don’t know what started this loop. I wonder if maybe I can use this somehow. It’s here. Does it count as an idea? Get up, get, get, get down. Could it be adapted in some way? I’m not averse to using songs to spark something. But these ideas, they only come and they come when they wanna. I nod my head to it, but I get the distinct feeling 911 is a fake life saver.

        After lunch, there are things to do. In the evening, I pretend to be busy, and I pretend that I’m just letting ideas gestate before I get them down. It’s not even lying to myself because I don’t even pretend that I’m going to believe the things I’m telling myself. And then, before I know it, Wednesday too is going going gone.

I can’t sleep that night. That morning really. It’s nearly four by the time I go to bed, defeated. I’m feeling confused and stressed because I haven’t written anything for so many days and I don’t know what’s happening. The sun is stretching and yawning its way up into my world, where I realise I haven’t actually drawn the curtains properly somehow, and I realise suddenly what it is: I’m thinking about the competition, not about the story.

        So that’s it then. No problem. Now that I know, I will start again this evening, and I won’t even think about it. I’ll just write a story. How it should be.

        No problem.

        Easy. 

Of course, that doesn’t work.

Come Thursday, my mind is in a deep fug. All I keep thinking is that I want to sleep some more, so I drink extra coffee and I just end up feeling queasy. I try to think through the problem, but it seems dense and cloudy. Ever since my realisation about the competition distracting me, it has become worse, not better. I tell myself I don’t mind, but I keep finding myself trying to think like a judge.

        What do they want?

        Some engrossing imagery perhaps, something that makes the words seem so tangible you can dig your hands into them, sink them up to the elbows, feel the squelch, the texture, the temperature. Maybe that is the way to go. Or maybe I should focus on the story itself, and try to come up with something that uses the prompts in an imaginative way. Something unexpected. It’s all about the unexpected, right? Maybe mix genres in an interesting way. But surely that’s all been done before by now.

        I go over to my bookcase to see if anything sparks a thought. But that’s a bad idea. I freeze in front of the shelves with the realization that if I start flicking through pages, even just reading spines, I might unwittingly plagiarise.

        I’ve been terrified of committing plagiarism ever since the time at university when one of my lecturers said a story I’d written reminded him of Douglas Coupland. I’m sure he meant it as a form of encouragement, but I’d just finished reading Polaroids From the Dead and I’d read all of the novels he’d written up until that point. It freaked me out that I could have been influenced by this, even stolen from it, without even realizing it. For my next piece, I found myself actively thinking “what wouldn’t Douglas Coupland write here,” as I was working through it.

        Don’t get me wrong, I know, and I knew then, that we are influenced by everything around us and everything we see. That doesn’t make it any easier to take when you learn that something you’ve created may not be entirely your own idea or style.

The week so far has been tough. I miss the buzz.

Every time I finish writing something, it feels kind of epic. Bells and streamers and sweaty fist raised triumphantly. All that stuff. I said before that I wasn’t competitive, which is true, but I expect this is how competitive people feel when they win something. I feel light and carefree. There’s relief mixed in there too, of course. Relief that my idea panned out in some form or other, that I hadn’t wasted however long I’d spent at the typing.

But with that always comes the fear. What if this is the last thing I ever finish? What if there are no more endings? Everything else could just meander along forever. That is present too. But it doesn’t dominate. The joy of completion is too powerful.

It’s getting late on Friday night. I have to finish the story before I go to bed. Before that, I have to start it.

        I spend time looking at the prompts. Just reading them again and again. Feeling certain something will present itself. The idea’s hidden there. The big one. I just need to make the connection. There’s always a connection lurking somewhere.

        I sit again at my laptop. It’s on a small table in front of the sofa. To my side, the curtains are open and I see myself reflected back in the black window, superimposed over the night. The K&D Sessions play. Disc 1. A blank document is open. The TV is off. It’s time to get started. For real.

There just aren’t the words.

        They’re nowhere.

        Which is a problem.