Life's Story

The cursor blinked, once, twice, until I lost count. Daliah kept writing the same sentence over again and erasing it, “His eyes were like fire.” She couldn’t decide why she even wanted his eyes to be like fire; it could've been a metaphor for anger, it could've been an after effect for some kind of super power, or he could've even been in a dystopian world where everyone had eyes that matched a certain natural element. She sat staring at the screen, hoping that maybe, if she believed hard enough, the words would magically form and grow into coherent sentences and she wouldn’t have to go through the agony of writing my first book. Without even meaning to, her hand moved towards the mouse and Daliah found herself browsing through YouTube looking for just the right video to distract her for a moment. She thought about looking up how to write fiction but couldn’t shake the feeling that it would be cheating. She had to do it on her own.

Daliah curled and stretched her fingers and tried again, “His eyes were like fire, little specks of flames dotted around the pupil...” The cursor blinked rapidly as she erased the entire sentence and leaned back on the chair. Her heart dropped and she felt all the energy drain from her body, she had been sitting for almost an hour and the only thing she’d managed to do was finish an entire box of chocolate chip cookies she found at the back of the cupboard. It was the weirdest feeling ever, she couldn’t figure out how to start writing, but she had an ending already formed in her head. She felt very tempted to just skip the beginning, middle and all character developments and just go ahead and write out the heroic ending where the characters defeat the enemy so they can finally be together, or something. But she thought it would be more difficult to try and direct the entire story on a set ending instead of just going with the flow.

Maybe that was her problem; she depended way too much on being ‘creative’ and ‘unique’ instead of drawing up a plan and sticking to it. All throughout high school essays, Daliah would write out the mind map after finishing the story. But this was different; she was trying to learn how to write a novel, an entire book that she hoped would have a nice aesthetic cover and be on bookshelves and read by someone other than her English teacher. She wanted to write something meaningful, something that would make someone feel something and maybe shed a tear or two. So maybe a little direction was what she needed.

Daliah reached out for the journal and pencil that she kept on her work table and opened yet another blank page. She drew a circle in the middle and wrote out the title, ‘Agents of The Sun’ and around it, she drew four linear lines with circles of their own at the end. It took her another hour, a cold class of water and countless moments where she just stared into space, but finally, the mind map was complete. By then, her room was overcast with tall shadows left behind by the setting sun and her skin had formed little goose bumps because of the chill that filled the air. She decided she was done for the day.

It was a week later before Daliah decided to fish the little journal from under the mess that was her desk. She didn't know why she had waited that long; perhaps she was scared of the looming dread that would come with more failure, or maybe she was just lazy because being at home during quarantine had allowed her to bloom into a full couch potato. The sky looked extra blue that day, the kind of blue that reminded Daliah of palm trees and California, even though she's never been. So she decided to drag a mat outside and bask in the sunlight.

And there it was again, the blinking cursor, her mortal enemy. She took a deep breath and went over the mind map, making notes and trying to envision what the characters would look like if they were real. Safari, the female protagonist, was definitely a Sagittarius. Daliah could see her clearly being stubborn and trying to hide her feelings because she didn't want Leo, the male protagonist, to think she was weak. The plot seemed good enough, the characters all had tragic back stories, which apparently made readers understand them more, and she knew the message she wanted to convey, but she still couldn't get over the fear. Daliah didn’t understand how actual writers did it, there were dozens of quotes and advice online that tried and failed to convince her that she only needed to write, and the rest would follow. She didn't know how. She couldn’t even find other adjectives to use to describe the fiery like eyes. And there was also the dreaded question, what if no one liked what she wrote?

The response to that came months later in the form of Daliah's best friend's 'advice', "Who cares if no one likes it?" She said in between sips of coffee after they had met up when the cafes reopened, "People are entitled to their preferences, all that matters is that it's good enough for you." Daliah looked at her friend and thought about the mess of a document that was titled Draft 07. It was quite literally the 7^th draft of the first chapter she had written, and admittedly, the one she could look at without fantasizing about smashing her already dying laptop to bits.

Of course it didn’t change the fact that the chapter was still pretty bad. She had finally learned how not to use different tenses on the same sentence and besides the okay grammar and sentence development, the story was bland. There was no emotion behind it; She didn’t feel captured when she was reading it back and that was okay. The most important thing she learnt was not to give up, that there was always room to improve. So Daliah kept going; she didn’t care if it was bad, she just liked the feeling of creating an entire world and being able to write it to life...