Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Musette

I met her just this morning. I was sitting at a cafe, with my laptop on the table in front of me and a blank word processing page staring at me. In two hours, I had to turn in a short story for my creative writing class. The topic was mythological creatures. My mind was blank. I could feel the hairs on my head turning gray as I stressed.

Rubbing the rim of my coffee cup, I felt a tickle on my nose as something flitted by it. I blinked, looked around, but saw nothing.

As I lifted my cup up to my lips, I suddenly saw a tiny face staring at me. The owner of the face was sitting on the rim.

"Wha....who....what and who are you?" I whispered. I assumed I was hallucinating and didn't want anyone else to notice.

"Name's Musette. Pleased to make your acquaintance." She looked like a dark haired Kristin Chenoweth. She sounded like her too but chirpy.

"Musette. Um, nice to meet you." I lifted my hand to shake hers but she was about the size of my pinky.

"You have writer's block. I'm here to help." Her iridescent wings shivered as she smoothed her silken skirt.

"Musette...oh, like little Muse?" I asked hopefully.

"Yes, that's it. You have what we call One Foot Out." Musette explained the diagnosis. One Foot Out was when a writer is being distracted by the real world, and has only one foot in the "writing zone" and well...one foot out. Musette went on to describe some other causes of writer's block.

"There's 'Butt in a Rut' which is when a writer keeps going back to the same plot point and can't seem to see the other possibilities. There's also 'No Stress No Rest' for those writers who need a deadline to be able to get any words out. From the look of things, you are not suffering from that one."

I looked at the clock, I now had only an hour and forty minutes left.

"Well, what is the cure for all these syndromes?" I asked.

"That depends on the syndrome and on the sufferer of the syndrome." Musette explained. "It can be as simple as a cup of coffee for some, an hour of people watching for someone else, music, yoga, a beautiful woman, a hunky man, even television! Musetti, that's one of my male colleagues, uses discipline."

"Musetti? Is he Italian?"

"Not Musetti, Muse-Eddy. He's from Brooklyn. He looks like Mr. Clean and sounds like a drill seargent. He's the man if you have No Stress No Rest."

"What about me? What is my cure?" I asked anxiously.

"You, my darling, just need some conversation." And with that Musette disappeared.

I was able to type my brief story and turn it in just in the knick of time.

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