Anticlimactic

Today’s prompt: “What does writer’s block feel like?”

Writer’s block? Man, don’t get stuck with writer’s block. Not everything has to be good! Just get something down on the page, even if it feels like written diarrhea. I mean, even that’s something. Death scenes and diarrhea aren’t totally antithetical. People die of cholera all the time. You can die of cholera!

So if getting some bad writing out on the page is like diarrhea, what does that make writer’s block in this admittedly very gross metaphor? Some kind of intestinal blockage? But that’s something, too! People die of intestinal blockages! You could die of a rupture!

Look, maybe we’re just being too picky about this particular death scene. Yeah, okay, maybe you don’t want to write about/die from the runs or an intestinal obstruction. But if we just sit here stewing about what a good death scene should be, a worthy death scene, we’re going to just keep drawing blanks and staring at a blinking cursor. And we’ll just give up, and won’t come up with anything at all. And you’ll have died, but there won’t be any words for it. There won’t be a cause. There won’t be any rhyme or reason, and there certainly won’t be a story.

Because that’s what writer’s block feels like. It feels like your death happened before it ever began. And that’s just anticlimactic.