A Night Owl's Writer's Block

I spun around in my office chair, head tilted back, willing an idea to pop into my brain. After a half dozen rotations, I was plenty dizzy but had no new ideas. I dragged my feet on the floor, and my chair squeaked to a stop in front of my computer screen.

The blank page was mocking me. I had spent two hours staring at it, with brief interruptions of writing a line or two before deleting the whole thing and returning to a blank page. I had been procrastinating on this assignment for nearly a week, and it was beginning to feel like it was now or never.

"Remind me why I thought a creative writing class was a good idea?" I groaned. My spaniel let out a little whine as she rolled over on the bed to look at me. "Am I keeping you up?"

She let out a sigh as she kept staring at me, her eyes asking if I was ever planning on coming to bed.

The answer was 'when I come up with a decent idea.' Or any idea, really. Everything I put down sounded like something I'd read somewhere else. Every character I tried to outline seemed like a stereotype, and every setting was somewhere I'd visited in someone else's book. I took a sip of my tea, grimacing when the cold liquid met my lips.

Great, no ideas and now a waste of tea.

"Should I just skip the whole thing?" I asked.

No answer from my dog, who was now peacefully snoring without me. It was tempting to just shut off the computer and ignore the assignment altogether. I could salvage a good grade even without this assignment, but it felt wrong to be considering it.

"This assignment is simply an exercise in creativity. It can be about anything you want. Any genre, any subject," I remembered my professor's spiel and rolled my eyes. "The only requirements are that it needs to be between 500 and 1000 words and have proper spelling and grammar."

Somehow the most open-ended and unstructured assignment of the term was the one that was giving me the most trouble. Maybe I was having so much trouble because it was open-ended. If there were too many options, perhaps it just naturally became more difficult to make a choice and stick with it. I stared out the window, trying to look past my reflection to the trees in the yard. The window was open a crack, and the curtain pulled away to let some of the fall air into the room.

The cool, grassy air served a dual purpose; to keep me awake with its chill and calm with its smell. I closed my eyes, ignoring the blank page again and just breathed it in.

A quiet meow sounded from my feet. I felt something begin to rub against my legs and start purring. Looking at the clock confirmed it was nearing 2am. Like clockwork, my roommate's cat felt the need to come to visit me as I worked at the same time every night.

"I don't suppose you have any ideas?" I asked him. He meowed again and jumped onto my desk to look out the window, a big orange fluff taking up nearly half the tiny desk. He'd politely avoided laying on the keyboard, not that it was actively in use.

"Yeah, me neither." I shut off the computer and reached for the tabby to put him on the bed when he stood and hissed. His back arched, and his tail puffed out as he kept his eyes fixed on the window.

I turned out the desk lamp and looked back out the window. Staring back at me and the cat, a barn owl, his head tilted ninety degrees. He hooted at us, and the cat hissed again and swiped a clawed paw at the window glass in response.

"I think that's an overreaction, kitty," I tapped the glass, making the owl flap his wings indignantly at the noise. "He can't get you. You can just ignore him."

The cat decided to ignore me instead and continued trying to pick a fight with our avian guest through the double-paned glass. The hooting and hissing continued, claws swatting at the barrier and wings flapping frustratedly until the owl decided he'd been insulted enough and flew off. The tabby leapt to the bed and snuggled up to my spaniel, his squabble with the owl forgotten.

I turned the lamp back on, powered up the computer and began to write out the conversation I had been sure the cat and owl had been having.