Here's one of my short stories that had to include a foreign language, a death and at least two characters : )
"It was a dark stormy night" emerged on the blank yellow lined paper in front of his gazing, concentrated eyes.
"No no, that has been done before," he mumbled. Crumple crumple. The paper took form of the cliche writer's block ball and got launched into the tin waste paper basket. Eli always wondered why it was called a basket; there were never any holes in the tin. But he also never got distracted and pondered about ill-named objects when he wrote. Words just seemed to dance from his right-hemisphere frontal love to the paper from the pen in his hand.
He sat there tapping his lucky black Bic round-stic pen and wondered. Wondered about life, ill-named objects and what was for dinner. Eli was awfully hungry. And the aroma of the freshly-baked apple crisp candle that mother had been burning all day was not helping. Hmph. He sulked into his puffy black leather wheely chair.
"Ya know, if it wasn't for that death, Eli, you would still be able to write beautifully," the little voice inside his head said. (Eli enjoyed making up other people in his head congratulating him when he felt down, just to make him feel better.) However, this little voice did not help. But for some reason, it just would not go away. Eli had multiple voices. He had a little French voice, Gustave, the alter-ego super-hero version of Eli, Fernando, and the cheerleader who cheered him on. But none of these voices seemed to be present... It was only that pesky droning writers-block voice.
"Okay you pest, I will in fact exterminate you. I just need to find out how."
"Silly little Eli. I'm only here right now because you cannot write for shit."
This angered Eli. A lot. He tried to remember the formula for his writing.
"Hmm... conclusion, intro, body paragraphs! No no. Body paragraph one, thesis, body paragraph two, thesis, intro, thesis, conclusion. Yes! No. Fuck. UUUGGGHHH!!!"
What was this phenomenon possessing him? It was exactly like when Sponge-Bob could not remember the order of the krabby patty and went crazy. Just last week he wrote an A-plus paper and people loved it. He even got a standing ovation from his class. But now, it's as if his writing is dead...
Yet suddenly, the lightbulb above his head illuminated! Gasp! "I can totally kill this writers block by writing my seven page economics paper! It's not like anybody actually needs half a brain to research boring facts and place them on paper," Eli then wrote his economics paper quite easily and jauntily jumped up from his rolling office chair and showed it to his mother.
"I see you're wearing your proud face, Eli. Usually a good..." she trailed off when she started reading his paper.
"Is that a good cutting off? It has to be good. You never do. This is the best, then!" he said with dismally dim ray of hope in his voice.
"Well, um. Darling. I don't know exactly how to phrase this. But, you tried."
"Enough with the annihilation." Eli sprinted up the stairs in a state of disarray and slammed his door. He opened his laptop and typed "short story starters" into the little box of the search engine. Humorously enough, "it was a dark stormy night" was number one. Eli chuckled to himself and realized just how terrible that truly was. He took a deep breath and tried to calm his frantic brain down.
"Come on bud, you can do it. You totally rock at writing" he said to himself. He tried imitating his little cheerleader voice, but it just was not the same.
"No no Eli, you used to totally rock at writing. You're nothing now. You're not your teacher;s or parent's favorite anymore. There's a new writer on the block. You're dead to them."
Eli cringed as he heard that. His eyes winced in pain, he shook his head to try to erase what he had just heard. He even shuddered. He tried and tried to get that damn voice out of his head but he just could not. He tried using all of the short story starters, yet none of them worked. By the end of the night, about thirty-seven crumbled papers overflowed that silly named waste-paper basket.
"Alright Eli. You're running on close to no hours of sleep, and have a massive amount of adrenaline that cannot be used until you write something decent... What do you know really well?"
"Hmm. Good question, Eli. I seem to know writer's block very well. But how can I write about writer's block when I have it, other Eli?"
"Easy Eli! Write for yourself. Have a passion. The reason why your economics paper sucked is because you don;t have a passion for economics. Nobody does," Eli knew this to be a fallacy. Mr. Guggenshteem had a passion for it for underneath that sweat stained blue gingham button-down and the khakis with that tiny hole near the back-pocket button, was a flame. And not just the kind of flame one gets after eating the cafeteria's chili con carne. This flame was much different. this flame was much like the flame Eli got when he wrote all of his miraculous short-stories and poems and such.
Reader, this is an epiphany.
"I just had a conversation with myself! ...weird. No, but really. I have a passion for writing, I just cannot do it right now, but I can, if I write about something I have a passion for (like writing). Which cancels out the entire writer's block thing so, AHA! (<-- epiphanous moment) I can just write something about not being able to write which would kill my writers block!"
"Eli, tu es un baleze," the silly little French voice said.
And so, Eli wrote his masterpiece entitled "Extermination" in just eight minutes, and reader, you are in fact reading it right now.
