Jason Lee - Staff Writer
It was around ten when the audience began to trickle into the theatre. The posters had promised a thrilling show of wit and eloquence. On the stage was a man at a typewriter, some sort of author. He looked neither rich nor poor. Nor young nor old. Nor large nor small. His clothes were of every day make and he bore no remarkable feature at all. The audience peered at the writer through their opera glasses in quiet anticipation. Just what kind of story was being typed?
The writer clacked along, some sort of off-kilter narrative about self-conflict. He checked his watch. There was but an hour till the deadline. Words flowed onto the page with ease, the tale’s snaking path lay clearly ahead of him. Until it hit him. No. No No. It was all wrong. The words rang dull and lifeless upon a second glance. The writer wrenched the paper out of the machine and mashed it into a tight ball, one quite resembling the state of his stomach. Throwing it aside, he began again, trying to salvage what he could from the senseless morass of the last attempt.
He was exhausted, his mind a scattered sea of detritus with the odd glimmers of promise that quickly faded when approached, yet still he forced himself to at least pretend, for the eyes of the audience were still upon him. He could hear them jeering now, their scorn and disappointment. The author held up a single piece of paper. It was blank. “All I could force myself to write.” he declared, in a shaky voice. He wasn’t lying either. The indecision really had stunted his progress. The crowd was for a moment silent. And that's when a riot started in the central aisle.
The crowd seemed to swarm around him, charging at their prey like wolves, hurling word after word of angry invective at the now cowering writer. His head swirled as he imagined the critics shouting at him, tearing his work apart into a million shreds. It was all too much to handle. The writer got up from his desk, slammed down the laptop, and stormed off to bed. He could work on the assignment again another time. Or so he hoped.