Writers Block

By Pat Spencer

As a life-long author of both fiction and nonfiction, I would never admit to suffering from writer’s block. But it’s fair to say I’m stymied. It’s not that my words are cumbersome or clumsy, falling short of what my story deserves. It is that I simply have no words. I sit so long before my laptop, staring at the blinking, but otherwise paralyzed cursor, that my eyes feel as if they just returned from a 5-star reenactment of T.E. Lawrence’s grueling trip across the blood-red landscape of the Jordanian Desert.

I live a short walk from the beach. No matter what spoils my mood—ironing, mopping, or scrubbing toilets—my cure is to spend an hour with my toes in the sand. While I couldn’t put the cause of my dried-up-well of creative thoughts into words, I felt confident nothing could stimulate the flow more than a summer breeze and the steady rhythm of waves breaking on the sparkling white sand. 

I own the greatest advancement in beach chairs. Even though it doesn’t produce electricity, I think of it as the Tesla model because it features every modern technology available to a beach chair connoisseur. The attached umbrella pops up with a gentle tug. This multicolored canopy is fully adjustable, leans in multiple directions, thereby providing shade to protect from the sun’s UVA rays wrinkling my skin any more than they already have. The sturdy cup holder is deep enough to keep upright my long-stemmed plastic wine class. A small side compartment snaps shut to securely hold my SPF 50 lip balm, detangling hair brush, reading glasses, and copy of West with Giraffes, which I must finish before my next book club meeting only three days away. Two handy-dandy compartments are built into the chair’s backrest. The top zippered compartment is thermal, perfect for keeping cool my Almond Joy and two tiny hotel bar size bottles of chardonnay. The lower zippered pocket is large enough to accommodate a pencil case, a spiral tablet for when the words flow once again, a spray can of sunscreen, and my pink plastic wine glass. 

With the efficiency of an assembly line worker, I lift the chair off the hook where it hangs in my garage and pack it with the aforementioned items. I slip on my flip-flops and sunglasses, slide my arms through the shoulder straps, pull my sun visor down on my forehead and tighten the band so the brisk ocean breeze doesn’t whip it off as I trapse down the winding road to Capo Beach.

When I arrive at my favorite spot, it’s late enough in the day that families with school-age children have left. The only people in sight are two women, even older than I, sitting on a red and blue striped blanket chatting and nibbling snacks, and a young couple doing a lousy job of keeping their hands off each other in public. 

This is perfect. None of these folks are likely to disturb my mental process.

Once settled in my Tesla chair, I breathe the healing breaths I learned in Yoga class, only I don’t move a muscle, unless you count allowing my eyelids to slide shut. I breathe deeply and count silently . . . one . . . two . . . three . . .

A gust of ocean breeze lifts the brim of my visor. I grab it and tighten the coiled plastic strap before it joins the seagulls swooping lower and lower as they circle overhead. I don’t know how those crazy birds do it, perhaps it’s x-ray vision or a hyperbolic sense of smell, but these pesky scavengers know when a person has food long before they bring it out of wherever they stored it. Whether deep in a pocket, wrapped in many folds of a beach towel, or like the Almond Joy tucked inside the storage pocket built into the back of my chair, somehow, they sense what’s hidden there.

But I’m pretty tricky myself. I will bring out my Almond Joy only after the gulls move twenty yards down the beach to conduct a surveillance flight of the women and their snacks. For now, I take out the pink wine glass and a single miniature bottle of wine. The wine is a mellow fruit-forward varietal, exactly what my psyche needs. As I savor the last sip, my breathing synchronizes with the rhythm of the waves breaking on the shore.

I don’t feel the plastic glass slide from my hand. I feel nothing until the rising tide hurls a wave that crashes at my feet and sprays me with a chilly mist. I hop up, retrieve my wine glass before it becomes another piece of the plastic pollutant filling our oceans and waterways and drag my chair to safety. My sopping wet shorts are uncomfortably covered with a thin film of sand. I consider heading home, but the air is still warm and there’s a buzz in my brain, the familiar feeling of words needing to be written.

I’m shocked when the waves recede to the call of low tide and reveal a hole, easily eight feet across. Is there such a thing as an under-the-sea tornado? How on earth did this happen? And if I hadn’t moved my chair earlier, would the tide have sucked me into this crevasse? Had my belongings and I been destined to become fish food or just more rubbish at the bottom of the sea?

I grab my prized Tesla chair and scurry up the sand replacement project intended to keep the beach from disappearing into the sea, just as my belongings and I almost had. The sand is soft; the ledge steep. I’m puffing like I scaled Mount Baldy when I reach the top and drop my chair back to the sand.

My visor is cockeyed on my head and pinching like a vise.  But when I straighten it, instead of feeling better, I yelp at a killer pain, like a screwdriver shooting in one temple and out the other. I yank off the visor and rub the side that hurts the most, the right side, only to find a bulge about the size of my pinky fingertip. 

“What the heck?” I say to nobody in particular, because now there’s nobody else on the beach. Did I make the indentation by cranking my sun visor too tight? Then again, my wine glass lies suspiciously on its side in the sand. Did I gulp the wine, and that explains my agony? Or did my drink spill when I fell asleep. I can’t say. I can only say this is the singularly most spectacular headache I’ve ever had.

I pick at the raised circle’s crusted edge with my fingernail, which makes the bulge hurt more. The stuff under my nail looks like dried blood. I didn’t suffer with pain when I yanked the band as tight as it would go, so being an amazingly deep thinker like all my fellow creative writers, I ask myself again, “What the heck?”

I unzip the large compartment that holds my writing supplies. The second minibar-sized bottle of wine calls my name, but I ignore it, grab my spiral notepad and a pen, then cram in the plastic wine glass. 

Words buzz through my brain, faster, louder, like a swarm of African killer bees. I drop into my beach chair and get down to business. The opening image electrifies my thoughts as I flip open my note pad. I scribble as fast as I can, but the setup comes too fast. I abandon full sentences and jot words, critical words. The theme of a great love and its loss hits me as hard as the ocean wave had. I can’t write fast enough. My handwriting becomes disjointed lines barely resembling letters. Emotions overflow my brain and rev my heartbeat. Tears fill my eyes, flood my face, drip onto the paper, and smear the ink.

I write so long the sun now rides the edge of the horizon. Its bright orange color tells me a green flash is imminent. But the thing that now interests me most is the gigantic hole only three feet from where I sat before the high tide splashed me and awakened me from my healing sleep. I can’t resist its pull. From my perch atop the new sand embankment, I see that this hole is not an ordinary hole, not one of those grown men dig to impress their sons. An entire family could safely hunker as if in a World War II battlefield bunker, except that a black gunk that looks like a burnt mixture of grease and tar the bottom covers the bottom of this hole. Even though I’ve never before seen such a thing, it doesn’t hold my attention long. 

This is all too much. I’m afraid I’ll lose the words careening through my brain. I must get home, to my computer, and open a new document. To hell with the single paragraph awaiting me, the one I wrote three days ago. This paper tablet holds the start of the best thing I’ve ever written, maybe the best I ever will.

I stuff my notepad and pen back into the storage compartment. Of course, the zipper snags, causing me great frustration. But words keep swirling in my brain. I snap my chair closed, then jam my arms through the plastic mesh straps. One strap pinches my neck, and the metal frame bangs against my bottom as I jog down the path and cross the street. I’m panting like an old dog by the time I reach the road that winds up the hill to my house. I slow my pace to a labored walk, but I don’t stop.

When I drop my beach chair in the garage, sand sprays the floor. Neatnik that I am, I would normally suck up every bit of that pesky grime with the Dyson rechargeable hanging on the wall. But not today. Today, I strip off my damp, sandy shorts and T-shirt, dump them in a pile, snatch the notepad, and scurry upstairs to my glass-top desk.  Sand sprinkles the keyboard when I tap the power button. Other than spilling an entire cup of freshly brewed tea, that’s probably the worst thing I could do to my keyboard, but all I can think of is to blow from the side as hard as I can. 

As the screen lights up, the dry and sandy sea water causes my legs to itch, an itch akin to fire ant bites. I swat my legs and watch the sand fall, like a bad case of dandruff, onto the navy-blue rug beneath my desk. Hopping in the shower is the only way to stop the itching and the shedding of sand. Instead, I plop into my office chair.

My hands shake with excitement. It takes me three times to correctly type my password, the one I’ve had for at least ten years. I am from the era in which typing was part of the high school curriculum. Even though I got a C- in the class, I’m now pretty fast after so many years of typing out articles, columns, and books. Still, my fingers can’t keep up with the powerful phrases and perfectly constructed sentences effortlessly forming inside my brain. 

I doze off with my fingers on the keyboard, then awaken with a jerk. It’s 3:00 a.m. when I chuckle at the sight of my final line.

gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

But the words above the row of “g”s fill me with a pride that surely rivals what Leonardo Di Vinci must have felt when he placed the last flick of paint on Mona Lisa’s smile. I type The End, save my document on my laptop, on the cloud, on two different flash drives, and email it to myself.

I place my finger to my temple, in the tender dent, and rub. The sharp edge of a teeny-tiny square stops me midway in the first rotation. It’s painful to touch, and the crusted circle of dried blood feels larger than before. I prod. Blood spurts. A glance in the bathroom mirror tells me the wound has bled down the side of my face. In my productive frenzy, I hadn’t noticed the wet, sticky slime. I wonder how that could be possible and decide to take that shower.

As water runs over the top of my head, I worry. Clearly, my visor is not the cause of the wound in my temple. I brush away the idea that I was attacked by a pesky, divebombing seagull. Nobody could sleep through that. 

I can’t give another thought to solving the mystery because the buzz in my head has reached a furious octave and the most stunning first paragraph for a sequel flashes like sparks off a swirling neon rainbow. My skin tingles. My muscles tense with the need for action. As cool water flows down my body, I slap Mango Splash Body Wash here and there, rinse, leap out of the shower, and snatch my robe off the bathroom door hook.

I’m still dripping shower water when I plunk back into my desk chair, dry my hands on my terry robe, and once again, pound the keyboard with a fury I’ve never before experienced. Even when strange images float in the back of my brain, I keep going. These apparitions, overlaying my thoughts like a creeping fog, have nothing to do with the sequel pouring out of me, so I navigate my keyboard with furious speed and dexterity until the fog turns into the fiery exhaust of a spacecraft strongly resembling Elon Musk’s shiny platinum-colored, penis-shaped Starship.

I pinch my eyes shut, trying to erase these illusions. No, no, no. Go away. I don’t like science fiction. Please take this spaceship away. I don’t want to write about it. I love, love the story in my mind regardless of how it got there.

As if hovering in the air, I see myself return to the beach, head cocked awkwardly as I sleep in my Tesla chair. Purple rubber-gloved hands move toward my face. The pressure against my temple is firm, but painless, until the combination swoosh and bap of staplegun slams me like a bullet. My fingers freeze on the keyboard. Obviously, it isn’t a bullet, because I’m alive and well (although I’m harboring new doubts about my mental health.) 

As if happening now rather than earlier in the day, I watch a shadow move across my sandy feet and up my legs. I hear . . . well it really isn’t voices . . .  It’s as if I sense their communication.

“Idiot! You didn’t insert it deep enough.”

“It’s fine. She won’t awaken for another hour. It’ll settle beneath the skin by then.”

“What if it isn’t deep enough to connect with her synapses.”

“You worry too much. The chip’s sufficiently deep. Even if it isn’t, it won’t hurt her. She’ll just never write again.”

“And she wasn’t writing anyway . . . .”

Chip!?! Holy mackerel! I have a chip in my head!?!

What do I do now? Should I tell the members of my writing critique group? I consider them my friends, and friends tell each other stuff. But we’ve had many a discussion about the threat of AI destroying the craft of writing and killing all creative thought. My friends’ fears of being replaced by artificial intelligence are real. We’ve shared our animosity toward frauds claiming AI products are their own creative work. Will my compadres see me for the phony I’ve become and secretly move their meetings, leaving no forwarding address, an action they deem necessary to keep their creative processes pure? 

Surely, if my writing group figures out what has happened, they’ll ban me for life, or at least until I have the chip surgically removed. 

I run my finger over the scabby sore. A sloppy insertion. It hurts and bleeds again. I slide my fingernail tip beneath the chip’s raised upper corner. I could easily rip it out. The sharp edge is close enough to the surface that the scar would be tiny, barely visible to the naked eye. 

But can I give up this electric new writing prowess bestowed on me through an amazing scientific gift from my mysterious friends from outer space? That’s a tough question.

There’s also the issue of hostile retaliation from aliens if a mere mortal dares to destroy their work.

My conscience wants the chip out of my flesh. An ethereal whisper asks, “How will you ever think of your brain as a source of information you can trust, now that it is nothing more than a slick plagiarizing device?” 

My heart sinks to my gut. Have I had my final original thought? Am I cursed to a life of repackaging the words of others and calling them my own? 

How can I hold up under this shame?

On the other hand, perhaps it won’t be shame that I experience. Surely, I’ll suffer a twinge of guilt.

But maybe not. Perhaps I’ll be swept away by the fame and fortune of becoming a best-selling author, a highly demanded public speaker without the time to meet up with my writing critique friends anyway. 

Oh, my.  I’ll miss my group.

Dr. Pat Spencer is the author of the historical novel, Golden Boxty in the Frypan (Pen It Publications) and the indie-published international thriller, Story of a Stolen Girl. Pat’s historical/literary fiction trilogy, Sticks in a Bundle, is signed for a three-book contract. Her writings appeared in The Press-Enterprise newspaper, National Beauty School Journal, Almost an Author, and literary publications such as Literary Yard, Potato Soup Journal, and Scarlet Leaf Review. She wrote human interest stories and served as a columnist and contributing editor for Inland Empire Magazine. A Healing Place won the short story category of Oceanside’s 2019 Literary Festival.