Where to Start, Exactly?

Martin had absolutely no idea where to start.

“What ya doin’?” said Clara, cheerily, as Martin started descending the stairwell to the basement, coffee in one hand, phone and notebook in the other, a scowl on his face. She knew what he was doing; it was the same thing every day.

“Going down,” said Martin, making it sound like he was on a one-way trip to the underworld. His mind was on this week’s creative-writing story prompt.

“Have fun writing! I’m going to the market, then visiting Trish. We’re having halibut for dinner.” It was a beautiful late summer morning in Maine with a slight chill in the air.

Martin entered the dark basement pondering his wife’s instructions, sat down at his desk, took a sip of coffee, pulled the sweatshirt hood over his head, and became a monk.

Have fun writing! 

If only.

+++

“You’ve got two hours,” Martin mumbled to himself, took a sip of coffee, turned on his computer, and the whole world gushed at him in a series of headlines: Protests in Tel Aviv, Indiana Fever Wins Again, Home Sales are Up, Murder-Mystery in Utah, Trump! 

Stop! Time-out. Breathe! Inhale… exhale… inhale… 

Martin clicked his way to the website for the weekly short-story competition. He scanned the five prompts, hoping for a Eureka moment, a just-add-water, paint-by-numbers, open-and-pour story, but, instead, the prompts floated around in his field of vision and he suddenly felt like he was back at school, sitting an end-of-term paper, experiencing those first few panicky seconds in the exam hall when written words don’t make any sense, and time is rushing, rushing, rushing away.

Stop! Time-out! Breathe! Take another sip of coffee. 

Martin quickly checked his emails: a water bill, an Amazon receipt, a Peloton special offer, a Fidelity Alert, and Let’s Defeat Trump! Stop!

Once a week, every week, he threw his heart and soul into the writing competition. Once a week, every week, his short story disappeared into obscurity. Obviously, the competition was biased or rigged. This would be the last time he would participate! It would be their loss – those clubby, know-nothing competition judges - not his. Clearly, they didn’t recognize genius, even when it was JUMPING OUT OF THE PAGE AT THEM!

Martin went upstairs to refill his coffee mug, decaf this time; acid-reflux was billowing from his stomach into his throat. The sun was blindingly bright, both from above and reflected from below by the ocean.  He checked his phone: no rain in the forecast, so the baby sequoia tree in the front yard would need watering.  Stalling, he searched the pantry for some cookies. 

Two hours! He returned to his desk.

“Write about someone who summons the creative muse through a convoluted ritual or method”. 

The Muse Prompt. 

It was as good a prompt as any other. He knew from experience that he could easily take two or three days just on selecting a prompt, only to find that he’d ran out of time. Often, he rushed out a piece of work on deadline day using an entirely different prompt to the one that he’d labored over all week… throwing his hasty, last-minute babbling at the weekly competition like sloppy spaghetti against a wall. 

He wondered if the other contestants took the competition as seriously as him. 

The phone rang.

“Yes,” said Martin. It was his youngest daughter, Penny.

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Dad, how are you?”

“Good…busy…” said Martin. He resented the interruption. He didn’t have time for small talk. Just because he was retired didn’t mean he just sat around…

Penny needed Martin to Venmo $200 to pay for repairs to her car. It was part of the agreement. Martin would pay for lodging, medical insurance, and the car. 

“What are you busy doing? You know it’s the last day of summer, right?” said Penny.

“Writing.” He needed to get back to the task.

“You’re still doing that competition thing?”

“Yes. It’s the one-year anniversary.” 

“It must be getting easy to bang out a story,” said Penny, “now that you’ve cracked the code.”

“Not exactly”. 

If only there were a code, a formula, a repeatable process, but every story seemed to start its journey from nothing and nowhere, somewhere in the cerebral cortex, in the operating system of his brain, in a pre-lingual place. In the beginning there was the word…

“Have you ever won the competition?” asked Penny.

“Not exactly”

“Well, I think it’s great that you are writing. We always wondered what you would do in retirement. We tell our friends that our Dad’s a writer!”.

“Did you read last week’s submission?” Martin wasn’t looking for praise, not exactly.

“Not exactly”, said Penny.

Martin was a bit upset. He explained how I Fucking Hate Parties was a good story – one of his best - McKewan-esque – a shoe-in winner, but, obviously, the competition was rigged in favor of MFA students, and women, and transgender authors, and ethnic minorities, youth, schoolteachers, therapists, fantasy-writers, cat-ladies and happy endings, and… Martin could hear how pathetic he sounded. 

He promised he’d send Penny the $200, exactly.

Two hours, a sip of coffee, stalling, Martin took off his hoodie. It was getting warm, so he opened the window, and the chill air spilled into the basement. He sat at his desk and logged back on to his computer. He put the hoodie back on. Stalling, now stalled.

According to the Phoenicians, the Gods do not count a man’s time sailing the seven seas against his allotted time on earth. Martin wondered whether the same could be said of writing. No, not of writing per se, but of the hours spent thinking about writing, of wasted days in search of the muse. 

He googled Shakespeare: “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention…”

A blank Microsoft Word document appeared on his computer monitor. “Select the icon or press Alt + I to draft with Copilot”.  It was tempting, perhaps he could hang something onto the skeleton of an AI-generated story? Perhaps the weekly winners use AI? Probably they did! Well, if they did it, why couldn’t he, goddammit? And who would know any better?

He cut and paste the Muse Prompt into the “ask-me-anything” Co-Pilot box … and up popped an 800-word story, titled, “The Enigmatic Ritual of Alaric Thornwood”. It was an earnest, preachy, five-step, journey-not-the-destination, story, jammed with florid adjectives that slowed the narrative to the pace of a geriatric golf game.  It was a story without a soul. Martin did not care if the AI-generated protagonist lived or died. To be, or not to be? Poor Alaric died before he was born. 

This happened to a lot of Martin’s characters; they just couldn’t get through the birth canal. 

Alaric deserved better! Martin extracted some writerly forceps from his bag of tricks.

Alaric Thornwood the great and wise storyteller, drew slender fingers through his long gray beard. Deeply troubled, his eyes upon the magic writing tablet, Alaric had absolutely no idea where to start, but he knew he must.

“What dost thou, Man-Alaric?” said Stella-Maria, his beautiful fairy-wife, an aura of love and light about her gentle face. She was boiling dragon heart in a giant pot in the small kitchen of the curious little cabin, perched high on the cliff overlooking the coast of Glynadoom.

It was a start, but Martin needed some kind of objective, or framework, and it was important to start as close to the end of the story as possible – he read that somewhere. He needed to know the ending to the story before the beginning took him down the wrong path, and the stakes needed to be high; someone or something should or could die. He read that somewhere.

Alaric looked at his wife through welling tears, knowing that he might never see her again, but he had no choice but to leave her. “I must inscribe our future”, he said, and, without further explanation, he descended into the cellar, magic tablet in hand. He was on a journey that he hoped she might one day understand; when their world was safe again, when Fairies and Men could live in harmony and peace, again.

Two hours was up; it was time for lunch.  Martin stopped typing and deleted everything he had written. Alaric was gone, dead, Stella-Maria too. Fairies and men would have to duke it out without the principal characters, and without him, the author.  Martin had an appointment at the local coffee shop with Buddy Curtis, a fellow Rotarian and one-time owner of a local four-car taxi company. 

+++

Buddy looked horrible, with dark shadows beneath his sunken eyes, unshaven and unkempt, stitches above one eye, a nasty cut on his lip, which looked like it had been split by the impact of a blunt object, or a punch, but he seemed in his normal upbeat mood.

“What happened to you?” said Martin, enjoying a moment of schadenfreude.

“Petra is divorcing me,” said Buddy, “and taking me to the cleaners.” He seemed quite jolly under the circumstances.

“Oh, I am really sorry to hear that!” said Martin. Petra was Buddy’s third wife, a doll-like Balkan mail-bride, half his age. She hardly spoke English, wore very short skirts and was often seen getting in and out of fast cars belonging to menacing young men in black T-shirts.

“Yeah. I’ve been cheating on her” said Buddy, untroubled, “with a younger woman, a real firecracker this time”. He grinned and winced.

Martin nearly choked on his toasted BLT sandwich. Buddy was about sixty years old, pot-bellied and balding. He lived in a small unassuming house on a nondescript dead-end street, drove a beige Buick, and collected monthly Social Security checks. His love-life, which attracted drop-dead gorgeous gold-diggers, was a mystery that made no sense. 

“What about you? “ said Buddy, “anything interesting going on?” 

“Writing,” said Martin, glumly.

“That’s great. How’s it going?” Buddy’s boundless energy and enthusiasm was sometimes a bit irritating, though not for women, apparently.

“It’s hard Buddy. Every time I write a story it feels like the first time”.

“I don’t understand. It can’t be that difficult, surely”. Buddy was starting to annoy Martin.

“No, you don’t understand. It’s very difficult to create an original story from scratch”.

Buddy looked unimpressed. “Man meets a young girl in a sports bar, and they fall in love. His wife finds out they are having an affair and conspires to have him killed by an East European thug. The man gets wise, beats the Euro thug to a pulp and forces the hitman to reveal the plot to the cops.  The wife files for divorce, but from the jailhouse, where it’s discovered that she’s not really a woman.” Buddy shrugged his shoulders, “seems easy enough”.

“It’s hard to explain. There’s lots of layers to a good story.” Martin wanted to reach over the table and throttle Buddy.

“You know what your problem is?” said Buddy, “you spend too much of your time with your nose in books and you don’t get out enough”.

Lunch ended on a sour note for Martin when Buddy’s new girlfriend walked into the diner and made all the men stop and stare.

+++

The afternoon went by at a snail’s pace. Martin dozed off in the armchair next to his desk, awoke after a little while feeling like he’d been roughed up by a Euro thug. At least the quick nap gave the mind a chance to freewheel around. There’s nothing like a dream-state, the cusp between the conscious and the sub-conscious, to give you a new angle, a plot device, a situation, the impetus, the spark.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Martin spent the remainder of the afternoon drawing Venn diagrams and story pyramids, annotating them with tightly scrawled, totally illegible notes - intermittently staring at the Muse Prompt, testing it out on the three-act structure, the seven point story, the hero’s journey, but it was like cramming a square peg into a… Venn Diagram.

The phone vibrated. “Dinner in five minutes”. The text message blinked at Martin. He stood from the desk and slowly unbowed his arthritic neck and lower back.   It was a joyless useless day, nothing to show for it.  Not one word, just sitting around. He emerged from the underworld, shedding his monastic garb.

“How did it go?” said Clara, cheerily. She was ladling a tomato and pepper sauce onto the baked halibut and rice, “what a beautiful day to be alive. Maine has never looked lovelier”.

The sun, setting in the west, was shining over a shoulder of land, casting shadow across the ocean, but the moored boats were still bathed in syrupy light, and the town on the far side of the harbor radiated golden warmth. An aura of love seemed to accompany Clara as she moved about the kitchen.

Martin was reluctant to admit that he’d made no progress with his writing that day. It seemed churlish and small-minded. He cast his mind back to the start of the day: “Have fun writing!” she’d said.

“I think I made progress”, he said.

Maybe he could salvage the situation, using the day – this wasted sunny day – as the material for his story, but he still had absolutely no idea where to start.