Writer Unblocked

Novelmates

By Rachel H Grant

Words wormed their way through his head like an infestation of ideas. Cyril chuckled as he wrote, a vision of main character Sandra beckoning him on. And his fifteen year old heroine was writing her own novel about school life and its daily dramas. Cyril laughed again, this was a fun hobby for his recent retirement.

He heard his neighbour turn up their music and sighed. Little did he know, that hairdresser Daphne was also writing upstairs, indeed almost directly above him. In her story, heroine Sandra is the same age as her, 28, but a teacher rather than a hairdresser. And writing their own novel about school children antics. Daphne laughed as she wrote. Life should not be this fun. Words ran through her veins like ideas on drugs. And like a careful configuration of dominoes just ready to fall, words pushed a crazy pattern to its dizzy destiny … as an avalanche of words thundered through her fingers.

In the top floor flat above Daphne, John laughed as the keys of his laptop clicked like a dismembered voice. And the voice was inside him, it was in the words that streamed through his head like a fast flowing river, it was in the words that appeared on the screen before him, like imposters that surely did not emanate from him, like a visible scream of creation.

John, an IT technician by trade, wrote of novelist Sandra. At 50 years old she had a chip implanted to help her think, to write, to throw words in to the void that was life … This would be a dystopian novel about AI taking over real people. John laughed like a maniac as he wrote, words filling his heart with their wild song.

Cyril, Daphnie and John would briefly say hello to each other on the stairwell. Daphne knew their names; no one knew hers. Secret souls with hidden quests, their lives did not intersect however their private worlds were on a crash collision course of insane words on the run.

One day far in the future, the three novels were published by three different publishing houses. It did not take keen readers long to connect the three stories which featured the same character at different stages of life. The publishing world was on fire. How had this happened.

Daphne met Cyril on the stairs holding her novel, School Solstice. “That is my novel!” she gasped excitedly. John came through the front door to find the two writers in deep discussion. Soulless words hung in the air as the three neighbours suddenly spoke to each other properly for the first time. Words linked them together like invisible glue. Nervous laughter sent invisible words flying. And then the idea came … they would write another Sandra novel, together. A happy ending flickered behind their eyes as they shook hands.

On the other side of the world, Sandra sat before her laptop as words rewired her brain. She laughed as her fingers played the keyboard like a piano, an inaudible music like frozen ideas waiting to melt. And one day they would, one day the novel would be published, making fictional neighbours Cyril, Daphne and John famous. Sandra laughed again, as she described the Victorian tenement with the residents who knew so little about each other. Of course the building would be haunted by the ghost of a Victorian writer, an unpublished would be Dickens who whispered in the ears of her characters.  Sandra stopped typing and picked up the leaflet next to her. Brain chips to enhance cognitive faculties. If it helped her write better, then why not? Sandra laughed as words once more played together on her screen, dominoes falling in to place, the crazy patterns of her mind.

Words whispered in the wind like ghosts. Somewhere far away, a writer hunched before a screen and laughed. Words pounded inside like demented drummers. Stories that knew no end and had lost their beginning, fiction fingering lives that would be known, the words of lost souls screaming in the night. Stories would come, a written word that would last forever.

Image by Deborah Hudson from Pixabay