Inspiration is a belief system : A story for writers

There is a girl in a creative writing class. She is struggling for inspiration. Her teacher suggests she keep a journal.

In the journal, the girl writes of sorting through her belongings in a shed and the finding of old schoolbooks. Amongst them, she finds the diary she kept meticulously from her ninth to a little after her thirteenth birthday.

The diary begins with fiction, daydreams, usually of a heroine riding a fearsome dragon and vanquishing evil with a flaming sword.

She writes in the journal of discovering the diary and its contents, and wonders if they might form the basis of a story for coursework.

In the journal, she writes about her continuing to read the diary, and notes a change of subject matter.

What began as bursts of unfettered imagination had morphed into an angsty account of events as they happened: autobiography, schoolyard politics. Epics turned to soap.

‘I opened to the last entry of my diary’, she writes in the journal. “The last words I wrote in my diary were ‘I want to be a writer’”.

She begins a story in the journal, about a girl who rides a fearsome dragon and vanquishes evil with a flaming sword. That’s as far as she gets. Evil doesn’t have as clear a face as it used to. Villains are not self-declaring.

So the girl writes another story about a girl who kept a diary and recorded her decision to become a writer, but cannot find inspiration, and instead gets bogged down with interpersonal problems.

She submits her story and it becomes the basis of a novel that no one will ever read, which she will adapt into a screenplay. Excused from editing for its basis in truth, she will direct it, and no one will ever see it, all because she decided that good and evil are childish things.

This has been the sixty-sixth publication of Dressing Gown, a daily blog from Ted Janet.