Et Tu, Thomas?

My husband is writing. Yesterday he declared himself to be writing a story; today it is a book. The problem here? I cannot think of a thing to write, and he cannot write a thing. He writes in sentence fragments, and switches tenses, and puts the word 'you' into narrative. It's a literary mess! And I, who have studied the craft, taken classes devoted to it, joined writers' groups before I was old enough to have a subject to write about, have writer's block. Fifteen years of writer's block, to be exact.

I do fine with assignments. Tell me what to write about and I can whip up a story in five minutes flat. But leave me to my own devices and I struggle for hours with characters and genres. It's miserable. I envy painters; they never have to look at white canvas. Just paint the whole thing black and then add color over that! But a writer can't paint the screen, or the journal, black before writing. We are left with either blank and unforgiving pages, or pale blue lines underscoring words we haven't penned yet.

And here is my husband, grammatically challenged as he is, showing me how easy it is to come up with a subject, characters, settings, plot-twists! It's unfair. How can a man who doesn't know a semi-colon from an apostrophe come up with a story to tell? How does he tell it? And I, who should probably limit myself to editing others' prose, cannot come up with one opening line.

Even the computer is against me! My spellcheck won't open. I apologize to the two readers I know I have, as well as the ones my ego tells me I must have. Now if you'll excuse me, this has-been has three chapters left in Dorian Gray to finish. Good night.