She sat in front of the monitor, staring at the white space. After a time, the spaces and breaks around the words she had already written began to form patterns as her eyes blurred and became unfocused. If she tried, she could make them change and morph, like looking for shapes in a popcorn ceiling. She reached out and rubbed a smudge on the screen. It didn't change. Getting up to retrieve a paper towel and some Windex seemed like too much effort...just as it had all the many other times she had noticed it.
In her mind, she pictured other writers in just such a moment. Not quite stuck in writer's block, but not really out of it either, either. Like being in some kind of slushy mud that allowed for movement, albeit stickly and slowly.
In some ways it helped -- and didn't -- to think of this moment as shared with someone such as Faulkner or Clarke or Seuss or Snoopy atop his doghouse, clattering away his latest saga unfolding on a dark and stormy night. Or even a student trying to pen a book report into an A-winning formula.
She closed her eyes and pictured herself in front of an old-fashioned typewriter, the smell of fresh paper, ribbon ink and rubbed eraser wafting up to her. Or perhaps a later version where, instead of the smell of disintegrated rubber it was the bright scent of Wite-Out.
She opened her eyes, and watched the cursor blink, gently encouraging her to push on.
She tapped out a few more words, adding to the fluxing pattern of shapes and spaces...and then backspaced over them. She typed them again, wondering if they had perhaps fit and she had judged them too quickly, and then highlighted and obliterated them. She stared at the cursor blinking patiently, waiting for her to spill her letters, words, sentences and paragraphs she felt were clamoring around in her head – but were unable to find the proper exit. And when they did, they fell out dull and convoluted and wordy.
A few more words tapped out of her fingers -- and again she deleted them, then typed and deleted again, the conversation rewinding and playing again in her head. She smiled, wondering if somewhere there were avatars of her characters sitting at a table trying to hold the conversation she wanted them to have – but unable to because she kept pausing and rewinding them, leaving them to hang in mid-conversation and thought.
Sometimes the words did flow, like a stream swollen with winter melt and s creativity. Other times, it was like trying to eke out a few sips of sludgy water-like stuff from an old East Texas creek bed in waning August heat. She wasn't quite there now, but she could feel the possibility of it looming over her shoulder, like an oppressive editor.
Sometimes she thought she could feel her characters' frustration at having to start and stop and start and stop again. Her actors in her mind-movie, trying to come to life in bits and bytes – and maybe, just maybe, in paper.
Did they get hungry as they waited to speak the words she wanted to give them? Did they tire and wish for a nap? Did they sit looking out the window of the restaurant where she'd left them, admiring the pretty day wishing she would just hurry up and pen the damn scene so they could go out and enjoy it?
Maybe, she thought, that's what deja-vu was – rewrites in her life as rendered by some author spilling out the words of her story. Maybe that's all I am – bits and bytes of existence in someone's laptop somewhere. Maybe...when I go to sleep that's the computer's shutting down. Maybe my characters dream, too.
Okay, she thought, that's just a bit too Rod Serling! Even for you.
She stared again at the blinking cursor, its rhythm and timing as precise as a digital metronome.
A bird sang outside her window, the refrigerator geared on as a humming back-sound to the clock on her wall, a neighbor closed their door and passed hers, whistling. The cursor blinked.
She felt her characters shift uncomfortably in the seats where she'd left them; again, sort of behind and to the right of them, there was the sense of growing irritation with her. The man began to tap his food idly and impatiently; the woman pulled out her compact and checked her lipstick. Beyond them , a car passed on the street, sunlight glinting off the windshield.
She looked away from the blinking cursor to stare out her summer window; she heard a car start and its radio blare on. Leaves fluttered and shushed in the growing breeze, and a siren from the fire station a few blocks away wailed into the afternoon, efficient and stalwart.
She thought perhaps a walk around the duck pond a few miles away would do her some good. Shake out the words that lay in messy piles in her head into something tidier and more accessible. Maybe read someone else's neatly-sorted and bound words out on her terrace, the moment accompanied by a cold beer and bare feet and thoughts of what to have for dinner. Maybe she would grill some chicken and have a salad...slice up a fresh peach for dessert. But she'd had the last one at breakfast, so that would mean she would need to go to the store and she didn't want to because it was hot out and she was low on gas anyway and she didn't feel like doing a bunch of errands and besides she hadn't shaved her legs that morning because she planned to do that tonight but she did have the chicken and fresh organic greens and that would also go well with a beer maybe one her brother had brewed the last batch he'd made was really good and --
She shook her head and reeled in her spill-jumbled, unfettered thoughts with another sigh.
She got up from her desk and walked to her office window. Years of dust had settled between the storm panes, creating a pattern of lacy settlement. The blue sky and air had the polished and new look of early summer, and the clouds almost like moist puffs of bleached cotton candy. Floating clichés. A cool breeze slipped through the screen and sighed over her skin, making the stubble on her legs rise a bit -- like strange sentries becoming alert.
And though she couldn't see it, she knew the cursor still continued to blink.
Her apartment sounded and felt oddly quiet for a late Saturday summer afternoon. By now, in the warmth of the day, there should be splashing and laughtery shrieks from children in the swimming pool, but there were none. She peered through the leaves and hedge and carport to the pool; she could see no one at first -- and then she noticed a lone, bikini-clad female figure stretched in the sun. The woman had on a straw hat and sunglasses, and, propped on her belly, she held a thick book in her hands. A testimony that it was possible to neatly tie together those elusive things called letters into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters and...thus...a story.
She again thought of her terrace and a cool beer, but instead padded back to her desk and sat down in front of her monitor again – stiffly greeted by the blinking cursor..
Shut up, she thought at it. I'm trying.
She felt her characters sigh. Not hard enough, she felt-heard them say.
Oh...you shut up too. It's not like you're birthed fully formed in me like some mythical God, and all I need to do is slap some clothes on you and send you off to the publisher. I have to create you as I go.
Well, that may be, the woman said, but how about more creating and less thinking about the whole thing? That's what's damming up the process.
She didn't reply.
Look, the man said, pushing back his water glass. He leaned forward over his crossed legs to face her better. What if I just told her what I was really thinking at the moment? That's what you've been hovering over for the past hour. What you keep writing and erasing. Then just...have her respond to that. That's what a conversation is. Even...I don't know. Have her call me a total and complete jerk-off for telling her what I'm thinking. I don't care. It'll probably sound dumb and stupid the first time through, but you can change that later, you know. We don't care what you write -- what we mind is not doing anything.
I know that, she thought. I just – I'm stuck.
No you're not, the woman said. You just think you are. You're stuck on the details. Just get us doing something. My butt's going numb from sitting here.
It's like your mom always said, the man said. Get it down and then go back and change all the verbs and adjectives.
Well, she thought...true. I guess you're right.
Of course I am.
And so she did -- she typed out the very words she'd typed and erased several times before and then typed out the next parceled set of words that came...and the next set. The tapping went from staccato and hesitant to a flurry of clicking.
Like a burst pipe, out flew the words. The cursor barely had a chance to blink. Letters fell onto the screen, shaping words, sentences, thoughts, feelings, actions, reactions. Paragraphs flourished and snapped into place. A page was filled, as was another -- and another. She fell into the coursing and flow, into the rhythm of her fingers on the keyboard. Unnoticed, the summer day wound into twilight and into darkness, the sun on its way into a new day elsewhere, as forgotten as her stuckdom.
She stopped only when the scent of someone's barbecuing dinner gently wafted in through the window and tapped her back to awareness. The room was lit only by the fading dusk and her monitor; at some point, her hall lamp had been clicked on by the timer, but she hadn't noticed.
Her fingers paused above the keys. Her characters were no longer dangling in some action, over some cliff of a conversation. She felt a mutual satisfaction of the trail of events through which she had pushed them over the last few hours. Yes, they said. Go and eat. We're fine where we are. We'll sit here and wait for you to return tomorrow.
Pleased, she pushed back from her desk and barefooted her way into the kitchen to revive her own characterhood with a chilled beer and some leftover cold lasagna, and wondered, mildly in the back of her mind, if her own author was doing the same thing somewhere.
