Limejuice Creativity

She stared at the blank, white page.  As she urgently rifled through her thoughts, hoping to fill the page within the next hour, she was skeptical that she could.  Her ideas were little black ants, scurrying, nipping the backs of her hands.
            She had only just had her hair dyed orange.  She asked for the colour of Ron Weasley’s hair, but instead, it was very bright, and still dark at the ends, which was unfortunately nothing like Ron’s.  She did like it, however.  She wasn’t sure whether she still looked like herself, though, especially since she had to keep peeking into mirrors or shop window reflections to remind herself that she was no longer a brunette.  The canny, chemical smell made her even more excited to shampoo it, but the hairdresser had instructed her against this until a few days had gone by, in order to allow the colour to “set in”.  She had imagined how chirpy and cheery it would look against all her blue and green clothes, but as yet, it only managed to achieve a semi-rock-goth appearance against her vibrant clothes.  She hoped that this would change after she washed it.
            A few days ago, she had started researching publishers.  She had completed her first novel, only a month ago.  Reading made her belittle her ability, as she couldn’t refrain from constantly comparing it to this or that great author.  But her mother urged her to trust in her talent.  She knew deep inside, however much she fretted and one-sidedly argued her inadequacies, that everything that she did would help her to grow – that she was continuously growing as she fed more and more into her writing with every word she wrote.
             And she wasn’t a bad writer.  She just wasn’t published yet.  She just felt too young and too new to it all to be anything particularly exciting.  She thought a lot and enthused, (or did she complain?) to her mother about how beautifully Harry Potter was written, and how J.K. Rowling was a genius of children’s literature because she did everything right: she wrote stories that were loved by both parents and children; she created places that appealed to every imagination; wrote characters that anyone could empathise with and relate to; and coated it all with generally beautiful writing.
            She was frustrated by her inability to come up with good storylines.  Her last storyline, she felt, was extremely limited.  She wasn’t unsatisfied with it, as such, because it worked in that context.  It didn’t need to be bigger or better than it was.  But she was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to make a bigger or better storyline when she needed to.  She felt that if her creativity was a big juicy lime, she was squeezing her plot from it with her hand.  But once she had sapped her strength and juiced it as much as she was able, there was still only a little trickle of limejuice in her glass, and so much juicy pulp left which she just wasn’t strong enough to squeeeeeze out.    A huge, multi-faceted, exciting plot like Harry Potter, she didn’t think she was capable of imagining from scratch.  Her last plot, as appropriate as it was, really had no action, no big conflict, no danger.
            She wondered, after all her pondering, what she would end up actually doing. 

Copyright © 2012 by Paige E. Hadley.  All rights reserved.

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