[BLOCKED]

Hey, you know, there are these 6-word stories.... They aren't even stories, really, as you can't have a beginning, middle, and end within such a constraint, not really. I'm still a little proud of my blasphemous creation "This is Heaven? God, You lied.", but let's be realistic, it sounds like a writing prompt.

A couple of days ago, anyway, I tried writing micro-mini stories, adding more words as I went:

6-Word Story

I found the mountain, and stayed.

10-Word-Story

I couldn't find anything else but I found the mountain.

25-Word Story

Could I say I found the mountain when I touched its base but only saw its peak? And that only because it was cloudless noon.

Each "story" expresses a different idea. Each one is also not a freakin' story. It makes me wonder what happens if we attempt to use even fewer words:

1-Word Story

Mountain

2-Word Story

I couldn't.

3-Word Story

Touch the base!

Yeah, let's be serious, it's like a psychological exercise to help you work out a theory on what a story is in the first place. I have heard of such minimalist poetry. Poetry has fallen out of the public's favor for a reason.

So if we require a beginning, middle, and an end, how few words can we get away with?

Beginning

I couldn't find anything else but I found the mountain.

Middle

Still, could I say I found the mountain, when I touched its base but only saw its peak?

End

I stayed there, at the base, because I didn't need to find the rest.

Guh, what a mess. But it is perhaps, technically, a story, pointless as it is. It's pointless because there is no chara, just a formless narrator wallowing in fatalism. The total lack of a chara is probably the biggest problem with miniature storylets. The people in stories are all too often the first to go when the writer has to ration priorities- and that's messed up.

Started reading The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby's personal account of living with locked-in syndrome. It's a brief little book, written over ten months as Bauby blinked his left eyelid- one of the last parts of him that he could move- and dictated to someone who penned one letter at a time.

There were days, early on in his paralyzed condition, when he believed that he would recover.

Day by day I feel my wasted time threading past me. Few things make me aware of that quite like this book.

I'm a little ashamed to even feel grateful for what I have, considering how I spend it all.

Then I remind myself- it isn't like I don't try to write, draw, create anything by any means. Everything feels so tiring and heavy. And pointless. Pretty much no matter what I am doing I sense the tug to do something more important. (Unless i am doing dishes or laundry. Those things are important, because they are useful.)

Trying to create feels like a waste of time itself. Just staring at the laptop screen and telling myself to reach for my sketchbook. Telling myself to open Evernote. Try. Try. Telling myself to try. That takes time too.

If I could not create, if the opportunity to even try dropped away from me, I'd want to do nothing more than write and write and write and draw.