one word after the next

She had fooled around long enough. Checked on her Instagram, looked through her folders, organized them, and the pages in them. She had opened the new folders and assigned the ones she wanted to the pages she wanted in them. She even posted on IG about one of them. The one about Unicorns and how you can be one. She liked that. But she had fooled around long enough.

It was time to write. A task, a task she realized she called it, was looming, and only once it was finished would she be able to live the rest of the day. She thought about that again. Task. When had writing become a task? She always prided herself on the fact that writing had always been a joy, a whim, an inspiration. But today it felt like a chore. How could she remedy this, she wondered. How could she turn the joy of writing back into just that, joy?

The only thing she could figure was that it had slipped into a chore because it was now a daily occurrence. But no, that wasn’t it; she loved to write daily, she used to do it all the time, and she loved it. So what was it? She thought, then again, was it the fact that it was a duty, a commitment? She couldn’t choose because she had already chosen. Was it a basic reality that because she’d committed to something, it made her want to drag her feet like a child asked to empty the dishes or do their homework? Or maybe it was a different reason; she simply didn’t have anything to say.

When she had written her first book, it had flowed like water off a cliff, looking for the rocks below to crash into with fury. Foam rising, mist flying, and rainbows splaying. She loved the feeling. But all the same, there had come a day when the words threatened to dry up where the river ran low, and the waterfall turned into a mere trickle, or it threatened to at least in her mind. In reality, she just kept going, kept sitting down and putting her hands to the keys, and kept letting her mind tick forward one word after the next.

This made her think of the word prompt in the texting app: if you tap the middle suggestion, you will eventually end up with a story. This is how it had been; she’d just kept tapping the suggested word in her brain, and in the end, she had a story. She did it. 100,000 words worth of a story, to be specific. Well, not specific, there were more, maybe 103,409 or something like that. She revised so many times that the original word count had fallen into the background, to make way for other information. But there you have it. She knew she could do it. She even knew she could force it. But she had somehow lost the how.

So today she would sit and press the keys, and she would hope that eventually a story would manifest.