Is There a Writer in the House?

The descriptions of the room gave out first. Tight but detailed sentences imparting the tactile feel of the long mahogany bar, its intricate wood grain deeply etched with the hopes, the dreams, the pains, and the pleasures of an untold number of people who had ordered drinks there over the last century, were suddenly missing from the narrative. The dozen-or-so patrons on this late Friday night in an unspecified season did not at first notice the textual mise en scène was missing, but the barroom they inhabited was fading quickly. The author of the short story found herself blocked.

The red brick walls, preserved for decades to provide an old-world ambiance lost color, began to fade, then blurred into flat, grey, amorphous material lacking vivid, descriptive under-painting. The floorboards, hundred-year-old oak planks, lost their patina and gave no distinctive feel to the key location of the story. The people went on murmuring general small-talk, oblivious to their plight. After a time that the author could have mentioned but didn’t, the bartender raised up from serving a bourbon and a white wine to a distinctly generic couple who would have no significant parts in this story and said, “Hey folks, everything okay?”

What caused his unease was the very lack of any reason he should feel so. The author wrote nothing to give a segue into such a turn of events. His question brought all conversation to a halt as every character in the scene affected some vague look of confusion, befuddlement, or simple surprise. Everything was most definitely not okay. Something was very wrong, but no one could quite say what or how.

The bartender realized that his unease would be much more interesting given better explication, perhaps several paragraphs, but he had nothing to offer. Given a new prompt from the author, he inexplicably knew he owned this establishment. He learned he had worked countless years as dishwasher, busboy, waiter, bartender. He found out that he parlayed his lifelong experience and life savings of an unknown currency into buying and running the most popular bar in this city/ town/ village/ starship, but he had no further back-story, no web of relationships, no ethnicity or even a name.

For all he lacked, however, his strength lay in his being the cliché of a wise, older man. He knew what to…

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