Writer’s block

It was a cold winter’s night in Madrid.

He stared at the words on the screen. It had been two hours since he had typed those words, taking care over each letter. Now he was stuck.

The black line which disappeared and reappeared every second seemed to taunt him. He imagined a small community under siege, hiding behind that impenetrable wall and firing missiles over. Suddenly individual letters turned into tanks, punctuation marks into soldiers. The white cursor turned into an enemy rocket. But no, he told himself. He had to concentrate.

He felt like Joseph Grand in La Peste, endlessly trying to perfect his precious solitary sentence. He knew he wouldn’t be able to do anything else that day. No matter how many times he tried to wrench himself away from that computer, that white blankness would draw him back in. How strange it was that a few flimsy words on a page could keep somebody in such a trance.

He zoomed in on the page, moving the page along so he could examine every curve, every line of the words on the page. Calibri (body). He wondered where the name for that font came from. What made a font different from another font? He typed in Garamond, Helvetica, Tahoma. All these names must have names behind them, he thought to himself. Somebody, somewhere, had taken the time to perfect each individual letter in that font, painstakingly deciding where the curves and squiggles went.

But what difference did it make to the content? The more he looked at the words he had written, the more he realised that fonts were useless. No font would write 1000 words for him. No font could save him from this endless abyss, from the yawning emptiness of that page.

He took a piece of pristine white paper and a pencil, and began to write out the sentence again. But halfway through ‘winter’s’, the lead snapped, leaving a tiny pile of granite behind. His weapon had been disabled, his arm neutralised. He dug the blunt pencil into the paper, slashing madly up and down the page until the sheet was just a few white shreds.

Panting, he threw the pad to one side. His gaze returned to the screen, and his fingers slid back onto the keyboard hesitantly. Slowly, he typed a few more words, and then some more, until his fingers were hammering up and down. Finally, he had what he needed.