Authorship

You're sitting at your desk with the lamp on and your laptop glaring at you.

You know this is important, more important than when you do it for yourself. This is the first time you're writing a story to a deadline and that deadline is in four days. It's stressing you out. You can't seem to enjoy writing anymore.

You've been sitting there for the last three hours so you stand up and walk around. The blood rushes to your legs and it hurts but you keep walking anyway, because it will only be worse of you sit back down now and then stretch around later.

You can't seem to put words together in a way that makes sense, to make words work for you the way they do for Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett. Curse this writer's block. Why does it have to set in now, of all times?

You leaf through the notebook you keep of half-formed plots and snippets of things you'll probably never continue, ideas that came to you in the middle of the night that you wrote down even if it meant losing a good night's sleep, but none of those things leapt out at you and demanded that you continue them. You try picking one out at random and typing what happens next, but it was apparently harder than trying to come up with something entirely new.

"It's late," your dad yells at you from downstairs. "Why don't you go to bed? Get a fresh start in the morning."

You take his advice and give up trying to mangle words into a semblance of form since it only makes the nonexistent draft worse. Maybe tomorrow you'll actually be able to come up with something halfway decent.




You need a plot.

Not an idea, not a bit of character insight since you can come up with that well enough on your own, not a snapshot of a scene, a plot.

Or a situation. Or some sort of event or ruckus or something, anything you can run wild with, anything where something happens.

See, this is why you can't seem to write anything longer than five hundred words. Events are foreign to you. You tend to write more on any given character's mental state. Not that insight's a bad thing but you can only go so far with your inability to write things as they happen.

Which is something you need to work on if you want to become a professional author. Publishers aren't going to look at a hundred thousand words of character introspection, even if it was written extremely well. There's no market for it. Nothing happens. It's boring. Even if you go the self-publishing route, you still have to be able to write events well for people to read your work.

Hell, you need to work on this now. Your creative writing teacher asked for a short story with a minimum of one thousand two hundred words but so far, you can't even manage a tenth of that.

You ask your dad and your brother for ideas.

Your dad keeps suggesting plotlines from movies you've never seen, and ideas off of books you made him read, and some from books you explicitly told him not to read but did anyway.

Your brother's ideas are too similar to the abstractions you already have a tendency to write. (You wonder if he's read your work for a moment, but just chalk it up to similar thought patterns. You are related, after all.)

Then he makes you read his short story for his creative writing class. And hands you a red pen.

Obviously, this doesn't help.




You consider turning in something that you already wrote. Old work is bound to be acceptable, right? The problem is you don't have much in the way of length or original characters. Much of what you write is fanfiction. Or flash fiction. Often, they're both. You have one or two fanfics that are long enough but converting them into original work is proving more difficult than just changing the names. You find that it's easier to just make stuff up on the spot.

(Besides, it's too much like plagiarism to for your peace of mind. Even if you are seemingly plagiarizing from yourself.)

The problem with that is that you get stuck in the beginning and can't figure out how to continue. You noticed you have a tendency to write the excessive amounts of background information in the first three or four paragraphs, and it, well, it doesn't read well.

Wordbuilding has never been this difficult. It's not like you haven't written an opening before.

Then it hits you.

You've never had this problem with fanfiction. Of course you haven't. Everyone knows who you're writing about already. Everyone knows where they live and what they do. You don't have to set it up yourself.

…

This isn't fanfic, is it? When you write within the confines of other people's worlds, you take the fact that everything's already laid out for granted. Now that you have to do it yourself, you find it more difficult than you imagine.

Never have you been more in awe of the people who actually do this for a living.




It mocks you.

It's right there on your screen, blinking at you, as if to say what an inadequate writer you are.

You think it's childish and irrational to get riled up by something as inane as the blinking cursor for Christ's sake, but riled up you are and its annoying. You type something in retaliation and you manage to get in three hundred words before stopping to see what you wrote.

You read it over. This isn't any good either. Writing any more would just be fighting a losing battle. With the blinking cursor.

It feels wrong, somehow.

With a resigned sigh, you keep your finger on the backspace key until nothing is left.




Your parents are getting concerned.

You've been holed up in your room since you got home from school yesterday. Given that you didn't have classes that afternoon, it means you skipped dinner. And lunch. And it's three in the morning.

It can't be helped. The deadline is looming and you teacher doesn't accept late papers. You're going to finish this on time even if it kills you. So you've been in your room for the better part of the past fifteen hours, writing until your wrists cramped up and subsisting on your stash of instant noodles which you ate dry and ran out hours ago. Your laptop hates you now.

Your stomach is protesting the fact that you haven't had anything decent to eat since breakfast. MSG-laden foodstuffs, it says, does not qualify as decent.

When you get up, you find that your knees are joining in. Between the lack of glucose in your system and one of your legs being asleep, you can barely stand, much less walk. Standing is uncomfortable, walking hurts.

You make your way to the kitchen without knocking anything over. When you get there, you find your mother making hot chocolate.

She's shocked to find you by the kitchen door, and is also relieved to see that you still have some sort of self-preservation instinct that tells you to eat.

Well, time to get what you came for.

"Hey, Ma, do we have any leftovers?"

"From what?"

"Just. You know. Leftovers."

"I don't understand."

"What's most likely not to get eaten in this kitchen?"

"What?"

"I just need something to eat that's better than crackers or instant noodles, Ma. I'm not picky."

"…wait right there."

You sit down at the kitchen table as she takes out some ingredients from the fridge and fixes you a very early breakfast. She also slices the bread and makes you some toast. She gives you some hot chocolate in the mean time.

Not that you're complaining, but you're going to be here a while.




An idea for a story comes to you. It's not one of the best ideas you've ever had, it actually feels a bit like cheating. It's relatively easy to write and doesn't have that much action in it.

You think that it's unfair to yourself, since you're not really improving with this particular work but at this point you don't really care anymore because the deadline is in five hours and you're running out of time. You need to turn something in.

The hard part is pulling it off. It's a lot of short scenes that you're not sure how to arrange and to top it off, the point of view you're planning to use is second person.

You've never written anything in second person before, except for that writing exercise your teacher gave the class the other day. You only had to write four really short paragraphs so you're not sure if you can do it well.

Huh. How to pull off second person. There's something to be learned from this after all.

So you sit down and start typing.




You're sitting at your desk with the lamp on and your laptop glaring at you|