ofwordsandverses:

caffeinewitchcraft:

-You discover a new document in your “completed” folder. It’s 20k words of fantasy and adventure. You have no memory of writing it.

– You take a sip of your coffee and set it down to type. After a moment, you take another sip only to find the cup empty. You have written ten words.

– You go to take a shower and discover writing on your skin. Dialogue, character description, tips for edits. You don’t remember bringing pen to flesh.

– The cursor blinks at you. You blink back. Time stretches as you blink, back and forth, back and forth until, at last, you both stop blinking entirely. Nothing gets written.

– The same word appears three times in the same paragraph. You edit them out, only to find them, again, three paragraphs down. You close your laptop and decide to go shopping. You stare at the word flashing by on the way to the store. You feel followed.

– Your pen carves vicious corrections onto a printed copy of your story. Later, you will not remember the way you grit your teeth while editing or why calling a character effervescent is “superfluous.”

– There are words scrawled on receipts, on post its, on torn out scraps of paper all over your room. You recognize your handwriting on most of them and choose to ignore those bits in handwriting you do not.

– Your mom asks about your day. You do not know how to explain the exhaustion in your bones or the way your neck aches with the weight of eyes you’d tried to leave on the page  or the way your fingers are still typing phantom words against your thighs. You tell her nothing happened.

– Your roommates are concerned. You have not spoken in days. You wonder who it was you were whispering to last night as you scratched out another outline at the kitchen table.

– Your computer screen goes dark while you stare at your last sentence, trying to think of where to go next. You did not know that your lips could curl like that or your eyes could look so black.

ON POINT. Some additions:

– You are in a work-meeting when someone says the word. The word which you have been grasping for, for the past two days. Now you must scribble it down somewhere.

–  You read a brilliant story. You get inspired. You write stuff. You forget about the story. Months later you think of a perfect plot. A perfect story. A Pulitzer-worthy work of art. You write it down fuelled with passion and coffee. Your writing buddy casually mentions your story’s similarity to the one they read a few weeks ago. Horror ensues.

– You are on the bus. A stranger catches your eye. There are worlds hidden in those eyes and you write down one (1) perfectly crafted sentence in your notes app. This will be it. Your novel. It isn’t.

– You see a black cat lurking in an alleyway. You follow it. (One must always follow black cats for they are the keepers of secrets). You play out an entire future in your head in which the cat leads you to an enchanted forest with witches and mages and dragons and magic. In which you save the world with the help of an invaluable sidekick. An hour later you find yourself nursing one of many scratches. The keeper of secrets doesn’t like to be touched.

-You read a sentence. Its eloquence overwhelms you. You will never be able to write like that. You cower under your blankets (plural) and weep.

-You read an old piece of yours. You think, wow I am capable of stringing words together. You read something you wrote five minutes ago. Agony. Disgust. Who allowed this person near a computer.