You go to Office Depot or Staples one Saturday morning. You are well rested, invigorated for the words to flow out of you and onto the page. You’ve already had two cups of coffee. You park in the big paved lot that’s already filled with cars. You buy a medium-sized package of lined paper. You don’t want to be overly presumptuous, but you are also aware that you have difficulty with brevity. You walk over to the long aisle designated for pencils and pens. A pencil, no, a pen. A felt-tip pen. No. A ballpoint pen. You like how the ballpoint slides across the surface of the paper, but you find that the ink dries up just too quickly, mid-sentence, even (you consider a quill pen, for the archaic, authentic feel of it, but you ask the man in the red collared shirt who works there and they don’t carry those). You decide on one package of felt-tip pens and one package of rollerballs. You walk to the checkout line. Wait. What if your hand gets tired, and you begin to write sloppily. Maybe you should just type the thing. You put everything that was in your plastic bin back where you found them. You return to your car and drive home.
You sit at your desk and wonder why you spent so much time at the store. You’ve lost an hour and a half. You feel terrible. You are exhausted. You need something to boost you up again. You go to the kitchen and put a piece of bread in the toaster. You pour yourself a glass of water. You wait. You take a knife from the drawer and slather butter and honey on top of it. You place it onto a paper towel and walk back to your room and sit back at your desk. You eat the toast with the honey. You feel a bit better. You remember you forgot your glass of water. You go back to the kitchen and get your glass of water. You go back to your room and your desk.
You open up the word processor. You lean back against the chair. You wipe the hair from your face. Now, what to write?
One scenario.
Another.
One evening, around 11:30 or so, you are re-reading Anna Karenina for the fourth time while sipping Papaya Oolong tea from a crisp white mug when, all of a sudden, The Idea manifests itself for the fifth time this week (and that’s a slow week). You get up from your supine position on the couch and go to your desktop computer and you write, straight, for three hours, never pausing for a bathroom break or to wipe the crust from the rims of your mouth. When you are finished, you sit back in your chair and scroll down on the computer screen, checking for grammatical errors, flat characters, a weak setting. You find nothing, not one error. Not a misplaced comma or cliché in the whole thing. You send it off to The Paris Review, Tin House, and The North American Review. You go back and lay down on the couch. You wait. The website says three months, but you hear back in one. Congratulations, the letter says, Again, We would be honored to publish your story, “Badger Fever” in Glimmer Train (you submitted to them at the last minute, and you receive similar messages from Tin House and The Paris Review. You will have to wait until the Fall 2011 issue of The North American Review to have your story published.) You attend a gala held in your honor with a handsome, compassionate intellectual at your side. You exude brilliance. And you look good too.
The life of a writer, in one way or another, in a nutshell.
