By Sydney Koeplin
- Open up a fresh Google Doc. Change your settings from default to Times New Roman, 12pt., double-spaced. The poets tell you that the best poetry is written in Garamond, but you’re a fiction writer, so it’s TNR all the way, baby.
- Crack your knuckles, then your neck for good measure. Curl up in your favorite chair in a way you know your mom would hate: legs pretzeled, spine slightly twisted, leaning onto the finest armrest Facebook marketplace could offer. This is why your back hurts! She’s probably right.
- Ponder for an hour or two. You had had a story idea in there, hadn’t you? Something about a woman turning into a goldfish or maybe a seal. It was going to be weird and wonderful and sneakily moving. Your workshop was going to clap for you as you walked in the door, beg you to show them how you did it. Grant you your MFA right there. Ask you to run the class, even.
- Light a candle—Autumn Leaves scented, even though it’s 85 degrees in Ohio—as if to conjure the Writing Gods™.
- Write a first paragraph. Read it, realize it’s horrible, delete it. What type of opening line was this? She’d always loved using the lavender salts in the bath, but now she was a goldfish, and she found they rather stung. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
- Tap your forehead a few times like you do the busted flashlight in the junk drawer. A few good whacks should make the bulb turn on. Your bulb doesn’t turn on.
- Have a moment of understanding as to why all the classic writers were alcoholics. Think of the bottle of Costco Cabernet that is sitting in your very beige kitchen right now. Decide against it.
- Remember that you also have a bottle of whiskey a friend gifted you, aptly called Writer’s Tears.
- Decide against that, too. You’re not Hemingway.
- Try a breathing exercise. Inhale, hold, exhale, hold. Box breathing, your mom calls it. Try it again. Choke on your spit, cough.
- Find yourself on Instagram. Spend 27 minutes sucked into the feed. Impulse buy a tote bag with a frog in cowboy boots on it. Open your family group chat and watch the video your dad sent of a duckling who is friends with a goat.
- Look up from your phone and wonder what you’d been trying to accomplish in the first place. It was MFA-related, right? It was, oh—
- Unpretzel yourself and throw your phone—okay, gently place it—in your desk drawer.