Title Subject to Change

"This novel isn't going to write itself."

However many times he said it, he found it more of a self-defeating axiom even than a excuse to tell his friends. Still, it was a convenient phrase to brush away with a chuckle the lack of prsence of work witnessed by dead hours spent in bars staring at empty paper and chewing on his pencils. He would come home with a scrawl of brilliant sentences that were completely incoherent by day's light, so they found their home in the dark of the wastebasket.

But what a romantic concept, he thought one evening in self-reflection. Why not do a novel that would write itself? It was so easy. The glass of port long since empty, he strummed his fingers on the cracked wood of a worn table as he looked up in contemplation. This is what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity. The concept unfurled, he stared out the cafe window at the twilight sky, and for the first time in years regarded faces in full color, filled with expression, emotion, pouring itself upon life's blank pages. Content, he swam home in the glow of the fading atmosphere and slept.

Still, to grasp a concept is not to change things. He went on for months, everything locked in the doldrums of daydreams. He didn't even pretend to write anymore. Some days he drank himself into oblivion, wondering the next morning that he crawled from the pub, had made it to the train station without staggering into some opportunist of loathsome character. Some days he wondered if he had made it home at all, but perhaps he had been reduced to a character in his own story, having to be whisked home by magic of the pen.

Some days the stench of liquor was so foul that oblivion-seeking became a joke, a pasttime of paranoid hatred best served off the pull of a joint. He'd walk into a bar, nurse a beer for an hour, and regard the fellow patrons with sardonicism. No gin mill proved dingy enough, the conversation of would-be dregs and rogues was just the same refrain repeated ad naseum -- sex, drugs, power -- with all the imagination of an insect. 'These are my fellow men?' he thought, 'These are the oppositional support to contrast the plastic faces, the hipsters, the barbie-loving mass-manufactured nonconformists?' And he'd have another and grow deeper and more bitter inside himself until nothing was real.

Some days, he'd dry out, just for a little while, and per chance catch sight of one of his old buddies who he scarcely knew any longer, if he ever had. There was one constant in the conversation: "This novel isn't going to write itself." He would sink his head and turn his eyes, trying to rework the tired catch-phrase into something that had some suggestion of modernity, but that no one had gotten to begin with. Or maybe they had. Maybe he had become two-dimensional.

Wearying of the drowning rats that swarmed the night in increasing numbers, he packed up and moved past the postindustrial artist scene that public radio announcers had begun to describe as vibrant. He moved to a neighborhood where the factories still turned out steel and billowing smoke and the dusk cityscape was dripping with blackness. Even the hookers had names, but no stories. Gone were the days of dubious luxury in an overpriced piece of shit converted warehouse, where the darlings of the nightlife still complain about a few piano keys struck past ten. Now he kept his things in a tiny tenement room guarded with bars, with a gas leak the landlord wouldn't touch because it kept out the rats. He didn't hit the bottle anymore -- the status of forsaken emptiness was enough for sustenance.

It had become time to turn these concepts, saved like unpolished gems, into words. But how to start. He wrote absent-absentmindedly atop a blank sheet, "This novel isn't going to write itself." Disgusted, he made it garbage. It was the same shit, nothing new, the same aged concept that wouldn't ripen.

Maybe it wasn't so bad. Maybe if he just kept throwing down words at least something would come out of it, however mediocre. At least he wouldn't have to repeat that damned phrase again, give his friends the damned manuscript, let them laugh and then the joke would be over. Fair enough.

Every night he came home from a computer screen to sit in front of a computer screen until mental malfunction bequeathed him the solace of sleep. Sometimes, he'd start off by throwing on a radio station, or some inane back chatter, just for a change of pace...just to break the monotony. But by the time the music played down, he was locked in the bittersweet compulsion of tying words together. Not thinking, nor caring, only sitting and changing words around, letting things flow out in electronic ink onto imaginary paper. He judged without self-reflection, tearing down whole trains of thought once precious, and building only out of necessity to get something done. In the end, he was a character in his stories, unable to tell reality from his own fiction.

As he wrote the final words that set fiction to fiction, he asked one of his friends, "How do you feel about people asking for your opinion?" With a 'no comment' answer returned for bait, he asked another, "How do you feel about semi-autobiographical pieces of fiction?" His friend shrugged. His friend's friend said, "All fiction is semi-autobiographical." The author said, "That's true and its not." No further explanation, the phrase was self answered.