Some days, there just don't seem to be any words. The blank document sits in front of you, inviolable. An empty snowfield that you can't imagine trekking across, because the bright sun and bitter cold would wear you down before your trail of footprints made it halfway across. Every word seems wrong; before you get halfway through a sentence, you delete it.
What does this have to do with my story, "When He Stopped Crying"? I wrote it on one of those days, when the blinding whiteness of the page seemed an insurmountable obstacle. A feeling that returned to me, only a little bit ago, when I was trying to think about what I have to say about this particular story. Because at some level, "When He Stopped Crying" says everything I wanted to say about itself, right there on the page: it's about being so tired that you're not sure what's real anymore, and it's also about how strange it is that a tiny creature like a baby can rule every aspect of your life, like some kind of mystical goblin emperor. There's nothing else to it.
However, I remember staring at the blank page that day, and feeling like I had no words inside of me. And yet, I had to find some, because I was at a writing date with a bunch of other writers. I could hear their keyboards tip-tapping, and I knew there was another forty minutes until we would take a break and check in. It would have been weird to simply pack up and leave early, but I couldn't take the pressure of listening to those keys tappity-tapping away for forty minutes without finding a way to join in. So, I succumbed to the peer pressure, and I put some words down on the page, even though I was sure they were somehow the wrong words and would lead nowhere. Eventually though, as I kept typing, they started to make sense, and now that story's in Electric Spec.
Sometimes, it's better to run into that snowfield without a plan, and
leave footprints everywhere, than to simply stare at it until you get
too cold, and it's time to go home. At least, one way you get to spend
some time playing in the snow.
Thanks, Mary! Be sure to check out her story on February 28, 2019!
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