Blockhead! Nah! Too cryptic. The Blocked Head. Better.

What’s the biggest obstacle a writer faces? Writer’s block! It doesn’t matter whether you write fiction or prose, getting those first words down on paper can be a bitch. And now here I sit - stuck! Trying to come up with a story idea. Mind’s a blank. Damn!

I remember reading historian Paul Johnson’s book Creators, about various creative artisans through history. Sometimes, for a writer, all that’s needed is the determination to do it, to sit down and get started. It’s not always easy. Novelist J.B. Priestley, for example, “sat at this desk at nine each morning and practiced strategies - cleaning his pipe, sharpening pencils, rearranging papers and implements - to delay the dreaded but inevitable moment when he had to begin putting words on paper again.”

And that does not always turn out too well! Remember Stephen King’s novel The Shining? Aspiring writer Jack Torrance, played so brilliantly by Jack Nicholson in the movie version, is an off-season caretaker at a remote hotel, locked up for the winter. He slowly descends into madness and one day his wife looks to see what he has been writing all this time. The great novel he was creating. To her horror she finds page after page repeating the same sentence: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!”

Looks back at the paragraphs above. Nope. No sign of madness. Yet! Whew!

That still doesn’t solve my problem. Where can I find a story? I remember the serendipity reporter with the local TV station. They’d always end the newscast with one of his light-hearted stories. He’d just drive around town, cameraman in tow, looking for something quirky or interesting.

I remember my Dad used to people watch. While Mom was in a shop looking at clothes, he’d sit by the mall fountain watching the passing parade. He told me he’d watch their movements, the way they walked, what they wore, the looks on their faces. Trying to speculate what they might be thinking about. No particular reason. He just found people interesting. Also a good story source.

Or maybe just watching the news. They had something not long ago about some lawyer in Toronto who got fined $880 for doing a chin-up in a public park. The parks were closed because of the pandemic. Could get a story out of that maybe. Or the news item about that rooftop romance in New York. The guy brought flowers to the girl walking in one of those giant plastic bubbles. Also a possibility. A good story reflects true life in some fundamental way.

Here’s a thought! Hang a story on a popular song! Songs often tell stories. Heck, Bob Dylan got a Pulitzer Prize “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”

How about Broken by lovelytheband? Lonely boy meets lonely girl at a flashy party. Neither of them fits in. She tells him, “I like that you’re broken, broken like me. Maybe that makes me a fool. I like that you’re lonely, lonely like me. I could be lonely with you.”

Isn’t that what life is all about? Finding a cure for loneliness. Maybe they split the party and go to a night club, not just any night club but a rooftop club with a retractable roof where you can dance under the stars. It has its possibilities.

The Guardian newspaper in London used to have a feature called Readers Recommend. Every week their music columnist would post a topic on the paper’s music blog and readers would recommend songs on that topic. Hundreds of songs on each topic! The writer would pick ten or a dozen to make a playlist and write a column connecting them all together. Topics covered include jealousy, murder, justice, desperation, disappointment, interlopers, unrequited love and dozens and dozens more. Fourteen years of songs, a different topic every week. Hundreds of songs. An endless source of topics for a short story!

Speaking of Bob Dylan, some of his songs could certainly inspire a story or two. Maybe I Shall Be Released about someone in jail pondering his cruel fate and longing for his lost freedom. The song is even more moving when sung from a female perspective. Nina Simone and Bette Midler have both done versions. Surely that could inspire a story?

His love song When the Deal Goes Down always tugs at the heartstrings. The lushly romantic video that goes with it appears as a poorly put together home video with scratches, light flares and other intrusions. Professionally shot with Scarlett Johansson as the love interest, the deliberate flaws add an authenticity to it that makes it linger in the mind long after you’ve watched it. Why is the protagonist watching old movies of his lover? Did she die and he’s reminiscing? Did they split up? Is there a story in there?

Flaws? All stories revolve around conflict. And conflict arises from our flaws. What about a story about a perfect world? A world without flaws? What would it look like? Are there inherent flaws even in a perfect world? What would you do with yourself if everything was handed to you on a silver platter? If you didn’t have to work. Robots did all the work. You just sat back and consumed, partied and had a good time. What if you also could live forever? No disease. No risk of injury. Everyone protected by a personal force field. Would there be any meaning in such a life?

Or maybe cut a story out of whole cloth. Create your own world, your alternate reality. Jonathan Swift created several alternate realities in Gulliver’s Travels. Tolkien created Middle Earth. C.S. Lewis created Narnia. J.K. Rowling created the Harry Potter universe. Not to mention all the fantastical works of science fiction out there. Bravely go where no man has gone before!

What if the current pandemic creates a revolution in online worlds? We have World of Warcraft and other such games where you immerse yourself in the world by assuming an avatar. You control the avatar and interact with other players from around the world. You battle enemies, form alliances and engage in swordplay or you can take a break from battle and hoof it to the nearest tavern to raise a flagon of ale with your chums. It’s no wonder one of these popular games, Final Fantasy, has gone through fifteen iterations and grossed over $10 billion since its first release.

What if these online alternate universes went a step further by developing fully immersive virtual reality. You would get a pair of special goggles and maybe even a gadget to attach to your wrist or wherever that transmits physical sensations to the brain. And when you’re in this world it would be like you’re really there. You would see, hear and feel everything as if it was really happening? Maybe you can’t interact with people in the real world because of the pandemic, but you could live in the alternate reality instead? Hey! I could call the story The Valley of Reincarnation. VR! Get it!

I think the Netflix series Black Mirror explored this idea a few times, most notably in last year’s episode called Striking Vypers. It was loosely based on the early video game Street Fighter but with a twist.

Wait! Wait a minute! I remember a few years ago reading a short story about a guy with writer’s block. Maybe that’s the ticket. The story was called The Simplest Thing in the World. The writer, Henry Dorn, had one triumph behind him. A novel called Triumph. It was a grand novel on a grand theme. A heroic novel. But nobody got it. The reviewers panned it. The one critic who liked it did not understand it. Thought it was a maudlin love story. Now Dorn is broke and needs to sell a story fast. So he tries to write something trashy. Something he knows will sell. He’s got talent. He can do it. A trashy short story for the pulp magazines.

But every time he comes up with a story idea, his inborn idealism twists it into a contrarian story about an unlikely hero. A maudlin story of tycoon seduces poor working girl gets focused on the tycoon, a lonely man driven to achieve great things. The girl is dropped and a likeable young man with absolutely no ambition becomes the foil. Can the tycoon save the soul of this man with no sense of self? He shelves that and moves on. Maybe a story about a blackmailer. But what if? What if?

It’s always the big what if with Dorn. He twists things around. What if the blackmailer is actually a hero? What if he blackmails lowlifes who live just within the law and gets them to do the right thing?

But Dorn gives up. He doesn’t believe such stories would sell. So the story ends with him looking through the want ads for a regular job. The great irony is that the story is by Ayn Rand. A Randian hero would never give up. A Randian hero would never cater to the mob, cater to bourgeois tastes. Dorn is an anomalie. He tries to cater to public tastes at the expense of his own sense of story. And he gives up.

But what an idea! A story about a writer overcoming writer’s block! Yes, damn it! I’ll do it.

What to call it? Blockhead! Nah! Too cryptic. The Blocked Head. Better. Or maybe just simply Writer’s Block… or… or

Screw it! Write first and think about the title later! I open up the laptop and begin to write …

What’s the biggest obstacle a writer faces? Writer’s block! It doesn’t matter whether you write fiction or prose, getting those first words down on paper can be a bitch. And now here I sit - stuck! Trying to come up with a story idea. Mind’s a blank. Damn!

Postscript: I have already followed up on several of the ideas in this story and three of them are published here: The Proposal is loosely inspired by the rooftop romance mentioned in the story. And The Chin-up Man is inspired by the guy who got fined $880 for doing chin-ups in the park. And Misfits is based on the song Broken by lovelytheband.

Be sure to check out my other stories on Vocal!

• What Happens in Paris... – newlywed virgins on their honeymoon have an encounter with a couple of naked strangers.
• Milady de Winter's Ghost – a ghost story with a twist ending
• A Sadistic Tale – a creepy Halloween story with a twist ending
• The Ugly Duckling - the classic tale retold in the style of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven
• Little Red Riding Hood – the classic children's story retold in the style of Alfred Noyes' epic poem The Highwayman
• Casey at the Crease – a hockey version of Casey at the Bat