It was long past there point where he should have done something. If, in future, he looked back at this moment within a timeline, it would be placed somewhere between almost too late and definitely too late, and just before giving up and watching T.V. He’d been staring at the blank screen for what seemed like an age, but, what was probably only forty-seven minutes. It was time to write something.
He had been in this position a million times before, sat at his desk, staring at his computer and TV screen combo, naked. It’s the way he’s written essays, it’s the way he’d written sitcom scripts; it’s the way he writes e-mails to his bitch ex-girlfriend. It’s not that he likes sitting in an uncomfortable chair staring at one 32” screen and one 19” screen, both of which are six inches from his face, it’s that he is limited by a lack of means and space.
He gets up to stretch his legs, he considers going for a walk to the shop but prefers the nakedness to the outsideness so he forgets that idea. He walks into his en suite and looks at himself in the mirror, he looks tired and dishevelled, grey patches under his eyes, his skin a slightly paler grey. He has just enough facial hair to hint that he might be able to grow a beard before he reaches the age of forty, a deviated septum and bad teeth. This is the writer, your writer. The man who can create worlds in the blink of an eye, the man who can paint pictures with the written word, pictures so vivid you can almost.....wait, is that a poppy seed in his teeth. He gives them a quick floss and decides to make himself a brew.
Tea in hand he sits back his desk and looks along his bookshelf for inspiration, two books on the life of Peter Cook (unread), Washington Square by Henry James (unread), Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger (unread), I am America (and so can you) by Stephen Colbert (listened to the audiobook), The Bro Code by Barney Stinson (read on toilet).
He isn’t much of a reader, which, for a man doing an English and creative writing degree, isn’t ideal. He is possibly one of the only aspiring writers in history that had written as many words as he’s read, in other words: he isn’t a writer.
His lack of literary skills aren’t entirely his fault. He is a product of his generation, a man brought up with the internet and a thirty-second culture, constantly bored, constantly consuming new media. He watches film after film, sitcom as after sitcom, spending hour after hour on Youtube looking at the latest viral hit. He and his whole generation have H.D.A.D.D: they can’t pay attention to anything at all but what they do has to be in high definition. To him, the printed word is dying and it’s being replaced by three minute videos of a man saying “Gap ya”. And he doesn’t care.
Leaning back on his chair he notices the poster in the corner of his room. He designed the poster himself, at the top reads the slogan, “Ambition is the enemy of success: Just give up”. Below is a picture of a cat trying to hang itself using a washing line. He stares at this poster for a minute or so, finishes his cup of tea and decides now he will actually do some work.
“She looked empty, empty in the way you imagine Mother Nature would look after a hysterectomy”- he liked that opening line. It had only taken him four Chuck Palahniuk books and staring at a blank screen for two hours but he had done it. Opening line: done! He was on such a roll he considered writing a book consisting purely of opening lines, but, as great as that idea sounded, he wasn’t prepared to write a book that just went on beginning forever.
Instead he thought he’d go for the more traditional option: hundreds of sentences, not too dissimilar to his opening one arranged around a plot. Now all he needed was a plot. Many people would think it was foolish and naive for him to start writing a short story without having a plot first. He felt that maybe he was like a jazz musician, able to produce impromptu magic at will. Of Jazz music, Miles Davis one said “it’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play”. The writer wished he could be judge by the same yardstick, so far he had written fifteen words and not written fourteen-hundred and eighty-five. The fifteen words were good, but the fourteen-hundred and eighty-five were almost perfect.
Before he compromised the potential of another word, the writer decided he needed a plot, and some characters. He sort of had the idea for the female character. He knew the kind of person she was but she wasn’t quite fully formed. When writing sitcom scripts the writer would compile huge biographies on his characters before he wrote a single word. Pages and pages of irrelevant information, such as what watch they would buy, where they bought their underwear from etc. Was this anal? Perhaps. Did this female character like anal? Absolutely not. Now he was getting somewhere.
He closed his eyes and pictured her, she looked cheap, she looked cheap in a way that suggested she’d done stuff in the presence of animals and clergymen. She had on thick red lipstick and had a cigarette hanging from the left corner of her mouth. She raised her left hand to the cigarette, holding it between her middle and index finger and she took a puff. As she pursed her lips, deep indentations showed around her mouth, she had been a smoker for a while.
He quickly scribbled all this down, the character in his head was beginning to take shape but he needed to get it down on paper before he forgot it all or before she morphed into something else. He furiously wrote for some time. He stopped, he had transcribed everything he’d imagined, the character that was in his head was now on the notepad in front of him. He read over what he’d written and paused, he then wrote “banging tits” and underlined it. This man would never be one of the greats.
Now that he had the main character sorted, he just needed a plot. Was it going to be a fish in water story like Finding Nemo? Or a fish out of water, in water, then a fish out of water, on land like the Little Mermaid? Or was it going to be just a plain old fish out of water story like that haddock he had for his tea last night (spoiler alert, it was delicious). He just didn’t know.
He didn’t have enough knowledge of novels to draw on for inspiration, but he had seen a lot of films. Now, he was no idiot, he knew that a book was basically a film that has been transcribed. His book didn’t have plot, all he needed was inspiration from a filmmaker that makes films despite the fact that they don’t have a plot, who else but Michael Bay?
Using Michael bay as inspiration, the writer came up with an idea: The short story would consist of nothing but glossy pictures of attractive people, glamorous locations, explosions, guns, drugs, flashy cars etc and all the reader would to do is repeatedly beat themselves about the face with these pictures until something kinda made sense. The writer toyed with the practicalities of submitting a series of photographs as a piece of work for a short-story course for quite some time. He eventually decided that this was the worst idea ever “What was I thinking” he exclaimed “who in their right mind would copy Michael Fucking Bay”. He then broke down and cried for thirty-seven minutes.
After regaining his composure, the writer stood up, went over to his window and opened the curtains in his room. Daylight. It was the first time they had been open since he moved in. The sunlight was dazzling, the sudden exposure made him feel slightly abash about his nudity, this soon passed. He stood at his window and saw a pair of twins walking through the courtyard below. At that moment he had a brilliant idea, he would write a story about not being able to write a story. It was a great idea. He racked his brains thinking if it had been done before, then he realised that Charlie Kaufman had done it. He closed his curtains and sat resigned in his chair. Once again his poster of the cat caught his eye “Ambition is the enemy of success”.
He began to type “It was long past there point where he should have done something”. Charlie Kaufman may have done it first, but nobody had done it this badly.
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