The Really, Really Great Writer’s Lament

“The writer’s block finally gone, David sat down to write the novel that would eventually become his masterpiece.  The end.”

Jeff sat back in his leather office chair, arms satisfactorily rested behind his head, and let out a sigh.  Goddamn, he’d done it.  He’d written the ultimate novel about a writer writing a novel.  Sure, Stephen King had been coming close to perfecting the formula for years, but Jeff Mandel?  Jeff Mandel nailed it in one shot.

The secret, he realized, was that the writer in his story should be just like him.  We’re talking an average guy, someone everyone can relate to, but also really handsome in a noticeable way.  And the writer should be trying to write a novel, just like him.  But that’s where the twist comes in, because the writer gets some extreme writer’s block that just totally incapacitates him.  So instead of writing, the writer sits pensively for hours and reflects on his life up until that point, trying to find inspiration.  Real solid stuff, the kind that can go on for two hundred pages of adjectives alone.

Jeff made sure to click Save As, even though his copy of OpenOffice had document recovery should the program crash.  He clicked open his browser and ran a Google search for the word “publishers” to see if he could find some contact information on where to send this thing.  Boy, when his childhood friends go walking down the rows of books at their local B.Dalton, and they see Jeff’s name up there right next to Toni Morrison and Dan Brown?  They’re going to lose their shit.  They’ll be commenting all over his Facebook wall about it, attracting attention to the book, which will lead other people to comment and ask about it and then Jeff will have to write a whole blog post about it.  It’s just going to be a mess, really.

But then they’ll read it, and they’ll understand how important the work is.  That’s why he wrote the book, after all: to shine a light on the anguish of the common writer.  He was originally about eight pages into a mostly non-fiction novel about his opinions on Barrack Obama, but he scrapped it when he realized that he wasn’t really a political beast.  If anything, he’s like the stand-up comedian of the written world, just observing and riffing on the things that we all already know, but don’t really know (in italics).

They’ll know soon, he thought, because I’ll tell them (in italics).

He went to open another blank document to start a Contacts spreadsheet, but his cursor stopped before he could reach the File menu.  His computer had frozen again.  But it gave him a chance to reread the last few lines he had just written.  It all seemed to wrap up so nicely, which life so rarely ever does for people.  If anything, life is super tragic, and it would be a betrayal of truth for his fiction to depict anything but tragedy as an ending.  He nodded his head in agreement with himself until the cursor started moving again, upon which he promptly highlighted the last sentence and hit delete, except that he accidentally missed the letters “th” of the word “the” and had to manually backspace a little further.  He started typing again.

“The writer’s block finally gone, David sat down to write his hit novel, which would also serve as his suicide note because he would kill himself soon after.  The end.”

Jeff leaned back again, pretty much satisfied.  It just felt so much more real than that other trite thing he’d written before.  He clicked over to see what Google had found, but the first three links were all for the Publisher’s Clearing House.  He laughed silently at the irony of the search result.  Didn’t the Internet know that he had already won the lottery just by finishing this novel? (in italics)

The auto save feature kicked in and he closed his laptop for the night.  It had been a long Sunday, writing this damned book.  And as ideas for his follow-up project swirled through his head, Jeff dozed off, content that he had changed the world.