The Drone

A Story by Lou Tracy

An elegy to writer's block.

You meet the blank screen again, artless, worn out, poignant. The magic's gone. Your steps have been sticky on the floor for the past thirty minutes, lapping furiously back and forth, almost as rapid as the words. They were pouring, heavy like cold air, streaming like rain drops promising freshness, but now they're gone. Irretrievable.

Somehow you managed to recreate the witchcraft that bore your last piece, but you got too intoxicated with it. You lost yourself in the air, shrouded in your electrified skin, peaked senses and you went out there in the city, tempted by the wet concrete and bright lights and you walked around dark streets and all-night joints with people looking for a midnight jolt while the music settled in your head and made good with the brains but now... now you're boring the sheet with metaphors made of lightning ash and you're trying to get this rolling but the heavy smell of concrete is gone and the night is darker now that the lightning's gone, but, most importantly, the music is impotent. Or maybe it's you who is impotent. You're so uninspired that you actually went back to edit the fifty words you've written, forgot to play the replay button, letting a sad silence descend that seems to have struck the last bit of verve your writing had.

An exam is waiting for you, looming over the morning, but you're way too disillusioned to study so you'll gaze at the screen somberly and sink into a sleep, eventuall, feeling like wet cigarettes and warm booze. The gimlet you've been shaking hands with was supposed to loosen you up, but really it's thinned your gaze or is the terrible writing that's responsible for that? Three paragraphs in, you're still so dull as to actually contemplate writing about love. What you're missing is a general feeling of discontent. Life's been improving and you've gotten lazy and weak; lonely nonetheless, which might be the only thing keeping your writing at the hack level instead of nothing at all. When your gaze wanders up again and you add several punctuation marks, you have solid proof the voodoo's gone, so you glance at an old manuscript with seven types of penmarks on it, ranging from black to light blue, crossing over each other and imagine cigarette smoke dacing around your head. All you're doing is rambling and you should call it a night, but you can't seem to let go. The paragraphs are growing steadily and it's time it started pouring, time it started rushing down against a screen capable of swallowing the whole of you, rolling further and further and you know you can never win, all you can do is smack letters for a few hours and start sucking up steam until you're as grey as a cloud, then rain down in black and white.

Unlike last time, nothing seems to have got you down. You feel fine, except you can't get your buzzards buzzing so you're looking around the laptop pointlessly and growing more and more sure that what you've written is pathetic, even thinking of scratching it completely. It occurs to you that it seems desperate to write about being unable to write, yet your last piece, one which you hold in high regard, dealt with the same topic. You have no further thoughts on this. So now you're thinking of the coup de grace on this one and you're wondering if it wouldn't be artistically appropriate to make it as boring as possible, however impractical that might be, or scratch the whole thing and screw the promise you made to yourself to stop scrapping what you've written. It's late, the hours are pressing down on you and that gimlet is nothing but a perspired glass now, but you're still reluctant to give up. You want to end on a positive note, but there's only one positive thing about this latest piece of crap of yours.

The screen's not blank anymore, you are...

© 2014 Lou Tracy

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Reviews

Briana O'Connor

I love the way you wrote a story in a way that flowed like a poem. There was a sense of rhythm to every phrase. I also am amazed at how you took a topic of block and wrote in a completely unblocked way. This was a very good read. Thank you for sharing.

Posted 10 Years Ago

Persona

I like your writing style but writer's block is a topic that is written about frequently on this site. I'd prefer to read an attempt at a story. Could you try spacing out the story too? It's clustered on the page.