The Masterpiece

For years he’d wanted to be a writer, wanted to sit around and write even if nothing ever made it to something he could publish. In fact he was sure he didn’t even want to publish anything - at least that’s what he told himself, when in fact it was a good excuse to get out of the actual writing. There were so many ways to procrastinate that he sometimes felt his creativity lay in the area of finding the ways to put off getting started. 

The most effective, strangely, was to buy notebooks on a regular basis, because this made him feel he was actually doing something about getting started. The process of carefully selecting a new notebook felt serious, like he was ready to eat down to work, when in fact it induced a kind of paralysis - the notebook he selected was always too nice to scribble in, and so he had a shelf of unused moleskine books, or leather-bound notebooks made in Italy. Not cheap, and a constant reminder of good intentions that never led anywhere. Maybe a cheap school notebook and a Bic biro instead would get him off the mark. Maybe.

He knew all the tricks, the idea of writing to a timer, not letting the internal editor stop the daily word count, writing fast, developing a routine, not trying to be the next Tolstoy. He’d read them all. But the nagging problem was, if you weren’t going to try to be the next big thing, then really, why bother?

And so the pristine notebooks sat on the shelf in mute accusation, waiting for the masterpiece. 

Meanwhile, the kettle was boiling.