I’ve spent more than an hour and a half this morning, trying to write. When I first sat down to write, I zipped off my rumination for the day, “things worth remembering are worth writing.” Thereafter, though, nothing flowed from my fingers.
An idea for a story attempted to break through the steel case that encapsulates my creativity, but it only dented the metal, sizzling as it recoiled from its red-hot surface. Then, I remembered, as I looked in the mirror. My face was beet-red, courtesy of three hours yesterday in a boat on a lake; the sun singed my creativity.
The genesis of the story, the one that failed to jump-start the creativity in my fingers, came from current news about death and mayhem involving battling motorcycle gangs in Waco, Texas. My idea does not involve multiple gangs, nor turf battles (at least not directly). Instead, the basis of my concept is that a very small motorcycle club settled on a few acres of land the club president owned on Espiritu Santo Bay on the Texas coast, south of Port O’Connor. One night, the same night a fierce hurricane strikes the coast, the club and the “town” that grew around it disappears. The assumption of people in the surrounding communities is that the club members and the frame houses they occupied were swept away in the storm. But that’s not what happened. Is it? And where does the story take us? I don’t have the answers, but I’ll keep the idea in reserve, in the hope that my inability to write anything remotely compelling this morning is a fleeting thing.
Maybe my creativity and the flexibility in my fingers will return when my forehead and nose and cheeks and upper thighs and forearms return to their pasty whiteness.
