wiggle room

The writer sits at her desk, ostensibly with so much to say, but nothing coming. She just ate a grilled cheese sandwich and is sluggish, cheese moving like drying lava through her veins instead of blood. She considers a nap. What to transcribe, what to put down, what to say. She wants to write a play. Has enough experiences and stories and characters to fill a book, but what’s the unifying factor? What, to be precise, is the point? Why should people care? She is at work, on the company clock, or surely she would take the nap idea and run with it, lay down with it, cuddle with it, the 10 hours of sleep she got last night notwithstanding. She sits next to a stack of books on writing: If you Want to Write, Writing Down the Bones, Bird by Bird, Writers on Writing. She reads them when she wants to write. They all say the same thing. Put pen to paper. Amazing that so many books have been written for people who want to write, and they all have multiple chapters, lots of pages, different publishers…and they all say the same thing: one word: Write. Right, right, just write. That’s easy, that’s…impossible…that’s like…the hardest thing in the world to do!!!! So the writer clicks her pen against her teeth, thinks about her teeth. Should she get braces again? Why didn’t she just wear her goddamn retainer as a child? She doodles a spiral, sings a Bob Dylan song in her head, plays with her lip. The lower one. Can you see it? Look. There is nothing to say! There is everything to say and no way to start, no door into the Universal. She gets up, resolves to try again tomorrow. Maybe if she reads another chapter of Writers on Writing, maybe if something interesting happens tonight, maybe if she gets more sleep, or less, or drinks more coffee, or bloody marys or…fuck it. Tomorrow, then.