Solomon loathed the blinking bar. It flickered like a metronome, reminding him he was constantly off-beat. He held his hands above the keyboard, flexing his fingers in case inspiration struck. If not for his hunched posture, he could pass as a pianist. The image was not lost on him, and he longed to string together words like an unyielding concerto. He preferred if he could tap away with any rhythm other than 4’33”.
In the window behind Microsoft Word, other writers fostered comradery through mutual complaints. In their forums, they ran the relays of writing growing pains, cycling through the struggles of engaging introductions, fitting conclusions, the mid-flow writer’s block, and exposure in the age of the internet. They alternated between seeking and extoling advice about topics dissected to the point of evisceration in countless creative writing guides. Solomon never participated, too fearful that his comments would not convey his English degree clearly.
The blank page exhausted him. He pinched himself across his eyes, squeezing his forefinger and thumb across his closed eyelids and against the bridge of his nose. The pressure dispelled some of the irritation in his forehead until he looked back at the page. The page was everything: a review, a journal entry, a résumé, a book, a grocery list. The content differed in each, but the stilted progress shuddered all the same.
Solomon did not write. Writing existed organically, blessing writers like a rain. For some, writing gushed all at once, spilling forth torrents of ideas until the authors drowned in literary ecstasy. For others, it courted them with occasional showers, and the writers had adapted to portioning out the liquid until more came. Droughts happened, but the hardy survived on the memories of water, recognizing dry spells do not last forever.
Solomon never understood writing as a natural element and therefore did not write. His process was violent and unwieldly, borne from mental coercion. He showered while searching for inspiration, hoping the hot water would ferment fine ideas rather than simply prune his skin. He sought out traffic so that his thoughts could not flee into the workday. He battled to wake from his dreams when they showed promise for short stories. He partitioned his days into slice-of-life ditties, pirouetting the line between poignant and mundane.
If he could capture an idea, he would allow it to percolate in a test tube made of errant notes in his iPad. He tracked any and all fungal development. A sentence there. The framework of a paragraph here. If the specimen had germinated, Solomon would then begin the arduous task of converting the growth into legible language, a mechanical process of splicing insignificant bits into meaningful chunks. He could squeeze out a paragraph before his attention span fragmented. These fragments disappeared across websites and music catalogues for hours. Guilt and anxiety would gradually pull his focus back to the production line. The production line would then cough out another paragraph, break apart, and begin the process once again.
After he had fused together an introduction, body, and conclusion, Solomon employed a sterilization procedure in the place of editing. He read his work aloud as if his voice could transcribe intonation, pacing, and flow. He located and purged repetitive words and phrases, especially wary of his connecting crutches called “however,” “therefore,” “that said,” and “as such.” He feared repeating himself. He could barely stand hearing himself once.
No work was ever fully edited. Solomon could slaughter a single paragraph into multiple cuts, finding flaw in each before churning it all into ground beef. Sterilization permitted Solomon a cutoff. His work did not need to be his best. It only needed to outlast his patience and creativity. He could promise himself he would try harder next time while simultaneously publishing his sterile words.
The black bar blinked. Solomon had sat for one hour, rewriting his opening sentence every ten-minute interval, touching upon themes spanning across his childhood. His lower back hummed with the beginnings of muscle pain. The plastic rims of his headphones hung too closely behind his ears. He wondered if he could rattle 200 or so words and convince himself he had worked hard enough. His clicker hovered over the “X” in the corner of the screen.
The page was empty. In the distorted mess of white, a beast grinned and salivated. Before the light of the monster, Solomon had not started writing, nor would he for some time.