Passion Project Blog Post #3
Update:
I’ve finished two short stories! One 3000 words long, the other about a 1000 words or so.
After finishing my first short story about the changeling in Romantic-era France, I was stuck for several days. I started to work on a story that took place during Nazi Germany, but I wasn’t confident in the story line or how I managed the topic.
I had been stuck with writer’s block for the past several days, clenching my typist’s fingers and wrenching my neurons in every uncomfortable direction.
I asked my dad; he gave me interesting ideas, such as exercising before I worked on a story.
Then at 11:45pm last Tuesday, turning in my sheets, I came up with an ironic idea — what if I wrote about my writer’s block? The things I learned about writing?
So the next day, under the influence of Glenn Gould’s beautiful interpretation of Brahms’s 10 Intermezzos (I am a romantic freak; do not question me), I wrote a 1000-word story. I later found it an interesting idea to use it as a blog entry, because technically, it talks about what I’ve lessons I’ve learned from writing stories. And I can be lazy instead of wasting 45 minutes of my time writing yet another blog entry.
Here it is:
Dead creativity.
Ivo was slumped on top of a pile of overturned notebooks, scratched out of his ideas. He could think of nothing but the coffee stains on the paper. The rattling of silverware. The spitting of the faucet. The gurgling of black coffee. The tinny sound of a saxophone on the cafe radio.
He absentmindedly stabbed the piroshki on his plate.
You were the prodigy of the propaganda department, he thought. Look at all the clever slogans you wrote. Think of something. Think of something, think of something. Under the looming shadow of tomorrow’s deadline, he pushed. He pulled. He tugged. But his brain just melted into shades of red and exploded into yellow stars. Strapping Soviet men bearing rifles. A balding, goateed man, dead for decades. A hammer. A sickle. Gleaming factories. Anything that would make the creative writing professor’s nose wrinkle and get the FBI to sack his house.
Repetition, repetition, repetition.
The bell on the coffee shop’s door tinkled, and a stocky Chinese girl stepped in. She stretched her arms and her knee-high boots, then promptly ordered a coffee. From her bag, she whipped out a sketchbook and a pencil box, plopped down on a table next to Ivo, and began to draw.
A jumble of things gushed out from her green pencil. She filled page after page after page with roses and peonies cascading over the rusting ruins of railroads, sweeping castles suffocated by ivy, incandescent bulbs gleaming on flapper dresses and martini glasses.
Ivo gawked. His fingers twitching self-consciously, he gathered five days’ worth of half-complete notebooks, filled with pencil shavings, eraser dust, and erratic scribbles. He packed them messily into his bag and stood up to leave, cramming the rest of the piroshki into his mouth along with his shame.
Still, he froze there, entranced by her careful eye as she conjured a galloping, nickering horse from a blank sheet of paper. Vines of his envy tangled into his hair.
She leaned closer to the paper, whipping her pencil into a flying mane, then she stopped. Turned around to peer at Ivo over her glasses.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Oh. Nothing,” he said carefully, trying to hide his accent. “Just curious.”
They stood in silence for a moment. Ivo shifting from foot to foot, the girl tapping her pencil against the corner of the table.
“How…” Ivo began. “How did you get all those things on paper?” He waved his hands around the horse. “The flowers, the… the… castles, the horse.”
She shrugged. “Practice. I go to the Academy of Arts. Been doodling since I was six. You?”
“I go to UC Berkeley. Major in Ukrainian history, minor in creative writing. But before that, uh…” Ivo looked down at his portfolio. He rubbed the nape of his neck. “I was a propaganda writer in the Soviet Union. Until, you know, six years ago.”
He cringed, thinking about the obliterated drafts he hid, ground down by many erasers until the paper crinkled.
“But how…” he said. “I’ve — I’ve been practicing a lot, like you. In fact, I have a short story due tomorrow. Yet when I put my pencil to paper, I come up with nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just factories, airplanes, ugly things that I cross out. For once, in America, I want to be my own novelist. A novelist who entrances readers with my stories.”
The girl thought. She cocked her head, peered at the bare patches of wall where the paint had peeled off, and squished her putty kneaded eraser in her fingers.
Then she looked at her watch and jumped. “Oh geez, I have to go for my next class!” she said. She slammed her book shut, shoved her glasses into her breast pocket, and shouldered her backpack. “Talk to you later? Same cafe, maybe?”
Ivo swallowed down the sour taste of disappointment and anger. His toes curled inside his shoes. He didn’t have time to wait. He had a goddamn assignment due in fifteen short hours, and he still hadn’t started.
“See you later,” he clipped, speed walking to the door, the girl in front of him.
“Wait!” The girl stopped abruptly before Ivo noticed.
They crashed into each other, Ivo spinning around and bumping into the doorframe.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” they both said, holding their hands out in front of them.
The girl held out a finger. Swallowed, two rosy clouds growing on her cheeks.
“I think self-censorship has built a wall of rocks inside your head,” she said, words flying out rapidly like sparks. Ivo tried to catch them with his small hands. “You can’t force creativity out. You have to learn to let it naturally flow out without thinking. This may sound counterproductive but if your writer’s block is severe, take time to write absolutely nothing. Go on a jog, read books, go on a movie marathon, but don’t write.”
“What?” All the words vortexed in his head as he tried to grasp them and put them together in English, then Ukrainian, then English. Write absolutely nothing?
“But when you’re done, knock the wall down. Let things flow in. The mustache of the old guy over there. The chandelier on the ceiling. The spout outside. Then take anything that pops into your head and bleed onto the paper.”
Then she stood up, walked outside, and melted into the shifting crowd of umbrellas on the street.
Ivo still stood there, dazed by all the English words thrown at his brain. Knock the wall down? Write absolutely nothing? The phrases and clauses crashed into his mental wall, piling up against the bricks. Letting out a depressed sigh, he prepared for another sleepless night cramming ideas onto paper. He shrugged on his jacket. Took a sip from his cold coffee. Then walked out into the San Francisco rain plucking at his scarf, the heavy weight of his bag straining his shoulders. He was escorted to an empty street by the sharp black outlines of buildings against the gray sky and Brahms’s ominous Intermezzo №3 escaping from the cafe radio.
Then in disobedience of his soul, his body slowed to a stop in front of his apartment door. He accepted it, just standing at the sidewalk, observing. Absorbing everything. The overarching flickering of the overarching street lamps as they turned on for the night, the navy car spraying oil-tinted water at his pants, the red and orange streaks of lights reflected on the glittering pavement, the white crossroads sign stark against the periwinkle twilight. The brown, dry edge of every petal in his neighbor’s flower box, the glowing blue-and-orange droplets on his window.
Take anything that pops into your head and bleed onto the paper. His head was crammed with images, flickers, words, musical notes, bouncing against the walls of his skull, longing to touch a crisp new page in his notebook.
Ivo smiled. He was ready to write.
