Well, we’re stumped. So what? This happens to every one who pursues the ancient and noble craft of storytelling. Probably happened to the cave people sitting around the fire, and you know damn well they didn’t whine about it. Let’s consult one of those inspirational books, shall we? Writing Down the Birds, or is it Bone by Bone? Don’t we have a dusty copy of The Artist’s Way next to our neglected dream journal? Steady your hand, Roderick! Those touchy-feely Zen-lite guides are nothing but pablum for lunatics! Writing isn’t a Cuisinart; there’s no manual for this stuff. Focus. Picture yourself climbing your books like stairs, just as the doctor suggested. Get to book fourteen, then pass through Holy Door of Positive Continuance. Here we go. One… two… three…
Classic procrastination, that technique. Paid a pretty penny for it too. Besides, it won’t get us out of this jam, not when we need to invent the character arc of one Lord Alisky Burrage, a high templar/necromancer/member of some clandestine society we created in book six, Icewind Maelstrom, whose name escapes us now. He was just a temporary hook to hang our ragged coat of a plot on, but we all know what coat hooks can do to our eyes if we’re not careful…
That’s it! This Burrage character should have some kind of bad guy physical defect. None of our fans will remember what he looked like, and let the few dutiful cross-referencers have at it on the message boards, as they always do. Years have passed, both in the Aether World and this corporeal plane. But what should his handicap be? Hmm, what if the lobe of his left ear was sliced off by a halfling’s dagger? No, too trivial. A shock of white hair on his otherwise midnight tresses? Too Susan Sontag. Maybe an extra finger? What’s that called… polydactylism? Too Christopher Guest in The Princess Bride. Talk about losing your touch, Fitzgibbons! Think, think…
Oh, but we can’t. Not with these new window treatments our dearest Julie recently installed. What is this pattern, some sort of poppy or begonia? Their leaves look like gloved hands splayed outwards, as if they’ve just finished a vaudeville dance. Such a mockery! And our writing desk. These Queen Anne table legs are sticking out like a loose woman trying to hitch a ride. If our recollections are correct, the top is decorated, though we haven’t seen the entirety of it in quite some time. Let’s tidy up some of these manuscript pages, grant applications, and watercolors from my fans—oh, oh God no. Ghastly doves in every corner holding olive branches, but the limbs look much too heavy for the idiot birds. Yet they seem to be smiling—sarcastically, no doubt—with their sharp little pencil-tip beaks. Where did we get this crap from, the upscale section of HomeGoods? Our room should be medieval, haunting, velvety…
It’s always a thrill to head off to some convention center in a “city” of 70,000 people, don robes and metal headpieces, sign books, stare at the hot cosplayers, and then slip away to poison ourselves at whichever motel the intern at Distant Kingdom Press forces us to sleep in. The clichéd truth is that the real world is frightening, which is presumably why we created the Caste of Aether. But aren’t all of us guilty of suppressing life’s horrifying realities? Case in point: polybrominated diphenyl ethers. Flame retardants. Used in everything from this old padded office chair we’re sitting on to the very computer monitor watching us work. This office is a coffin. Let’s call the Samsung consumer hotline, see if they use any PBDE-laced plastics. “Hello? Um, this is Nebula Award-winning writer R. J. Fitzgibbons. Yes, that’s the one. A fan of Tarnished Rapiers? Wow, my early stuff. I thought that had gone out of print. Let’s be honest then. Are you exposing me to toxic bromides?” That would actually be quite hilarious, since it’s a chemical in flame-retardant, but a bromide is also an unoriginal saying. We would have a laugh about that…
What are some other writerly tricks? Balzac drank tons of coffee. That other guy smelled rotting apples when he was blocked. Some pin an inspiring quote to their wall. That E. L. Doctorow one is so apt, the one that compares writing to driving at night. He talked about you can travel a great distance by seeing only what’s in your headlights. Let’s shine them on Lord Alisky, flick on the high beams. But we can’t see him, not through all this mental fog. So roll down your window, maybe we can smell him. What if he smells like fog? That sounds good…
Listen to yourself for a second! You’re not trying to win some fiction contest here. What was this Craftsman-style bungalow built on? Your manuscripts. Your self-created universe featuring buxom maidens, gallivanting knights, and so many superficially overdetermined hyper-narratives that we’ve lost track. Critics say our books come out of an assembly line. Those bastards should stop by and put in an eight-hour day in this factory. We’d show them. What R. J. does and what they do isn’t so different. We’re all working with the Greek phonetic alphabet, a technology that is only 2,500 years old, and far from perfect, that much is certain. But here’s the crucial difference: while they use words to destroy, we employ language to create. We’ve built a life on these things called words, powerful idea-soldiers no taller than a few millimeters, which are both physical, imprinted on paper or pixels, and ephemeral, flitting through the reader’s mind, conjuring scenes, images, feelings, and then vanishing through the synaptic conduits just as fast as they arrived. Ah yes, time to begin anew, Roderick. You know, Stephen King’s On Writing had some great points on first drafts…