In The Zone

The following essay is a recreation of how I remember the essay going. Unfortunately the essay was lost to time, and I have to do my best to remember how I wrote the story. I'm pretty sure I wrote it better the first time.

Writers block is one hell of a thing, but there are worse fates a writer can face.The desire to write fluidly, the desire to be inspired and to enter a flow state, these are desires that plague the budding writer. As buddah said, desire is root of all evil.

I was sitting at my desk one day, banging my head againt the wall trying to get anything, to come up with any original premise for my pen to begin scuplting out, when suddenly I was struck by a notion. What if I was to write about a writer, a writer who is unable to come up with an idea, but who then suddenly gets the idea to write about a writer with writer's block. Like mirrors in mirrors, the idea consumed me like a kaleidescope, a fun-house mirror that distorted my already ugly face. Instantly I pressed pen to paper and the thoughts began to flow out of me. I was no longer in control, the pen was now the master and I the slave. My eyes and body followed it like a dog on a leash, seemingly it had a mind of it's own.

The weird thing was that I could feel him. I could feel the other writer, the one in my story. He was trapped too. He was describing me as I was describing him, pen pressed to paper, writing in a furious sweat, turning page after page as exposition was elaborated upon, actions described with lists of never ending adjectives, metaphores were extended well beyond their welcome. My prayers had been answered, but this was not exactly what I wanted. Day turned to night as the final page of my noteboook filled up, and my hand began writing on the table. The writer on the other side was trapped too, as I described him gritting his teeth through the pains in his wrist, his family yelling in the background that something must be wrong with him.

Something had to be done, one of us had to end this, but how? It slowly dawned on me that only the unthinkable will allow me to escape this nightmare. With great reluctance I described him turning his pencil point up on his desk, as he grabbed the back of his head with his other hand. Suddenly against my will I grabbed my compass and thrust it into my thigh. That bastard! He knew what was up, but I had to focus. My hand ceased stabbing and reached for my craft-knife. I excecuted, my pen swiftly dotting the punctuation on the final sentence of my story.

"and then he slammed his head onto the desk with full force, the pencil pentrating his left eye."

Suddenly I was free.