in this paragraph.
– What if I don’t have literary talent? What if I’m completely untalented? – thought Peter, looking at the few lines that hovered on the screen under the large heading: «THE DEVIL IN THE WORDS.»
He got up from his chair and went to the window. Pulling back the curtain, he looked into the backyard, where there were many poplar trees and cars parked on the side of the road. He lived on the first floor, and looked up at the trees, which created the feeling that the house was almost in the forest.
Peter tried to come up with the first chapter, to spin a plot in his head that he could use for his book. Alas, there was no plot.
He returned to the computer, sat down in his chair, took a sip of coffee, and opened the website where the most prolific authors were published. Among the most prolific, Peter discovered those who wrote over one thousand novels.
– A thousand novels! – Peter exclaimed, peering at the numbers and trying to imagine what so many books could be written about. After all, he himself could not come up with a plot for even one, and there, one man, wrote a thousand books.
He took another sip of his coffee, trying to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t a genius. After all, if he were a genius, he could easily figure out what to write about at least the first chapter of his book.
Turning on his favorite song, he leaned back in his chair and threw his hands behind his head, beginning to reflect on the plot of the book. Basically, he imagined that he wanted to write a book about a writer who writes a book, and then it gets picked up by a publisher, and the writer makes a ton of money from it. But he had absolutely no idea what to fill the chapters with. After all, an idea is literally a couple of lines, and each chapter should be several pages long. Publishers took at least eight author’s pages to print books, which is almost two hundred and fifty pages of text. Peter didn’t want to write a story; ideally, it should have been a novel, or at least a small book that wouldn’t look like a brochure from a newsstand.
As time went. Peter sat at the computer and wrote down a few sentences from time to time. The text of the book grew. The second and third paragraphs appeared. Peter even thought that if he wrote at such a speed, he could finish a whole chapter in a day. It was only necessary to catch the impulse of inspiration. Some authors wrote twenty novels a year, which is almost two novels a month, that is, at least one thousand pages of text per month. It was quite possible to write one chapter in a day, and moreover, Peter felt that he could do it.
He gathered all his thoughts into one and began to write. Lines began to appear on a white sheet of paper on the monitor. Dialogues and scenes appeared, characters began to do something, they began to come to life, becoming not just text, but characters who had their own desires and thoughts.
In a burst of inspiration, Peter sat at the computer until lunch. He managed to write an entire chapter in literally three hours. The chapter was small, only two and a half thousand words, but for Peter it was a real achievement, he felt the strength to create. However, there was no plot as such yet. He simply wrote down what came to his mind.
The sound of keys clicking came from the corridor. My sister returned from school. Motya ran out into the corridor to meet her. She took off her briefcase and went to her room. Peter watched her through the slightly open door.
Taking the mug, he noticed that it was out of coffee. He got up from the table and went to the kitchen to pour something new.
Turning on the kettle, he poured sugar and coffee into the mug, and when the kettle boiled, he poured hot water over everything, adding milk at the end.
He returned to the room, but his sister was already sitting at the computer, heatedly discussing something on a social network.
– Now I’m sitting at the computer. – she said, typing a message.
Peter put the coffee mug on the table and went to the kitchen to watch TV.
There was still a series about witches on TV. It was shown almost all day. Peter sat down at the table, leaned his elbows on his hands, and began to watch him. Several episodes were shown a day. Most of them repeated, adding only one new one per day. Peter looked thoughtfully at the TV, but it was obvious that his thoughts were somewhere else.
After half an hour, he couldn’t stand it anymore and went into the room to get his computer back. Sitting on a chair in the kitchen was not as comfortable as sitting in a chair at the computer.
– How long are you going to be? – he asked, turning to his sister.
– I don’t know, I need to wait for an answer.
– How long will you wait for him?
«I’m telling you, I don’t know.»
Peter went back to the kitchen. He returned to the table and continued watching the series. He remembered seeing the books that the series was based on and thought that maybe he should write something like the series too. It seemed easier to write that way. But these thoughts still did not solve the main problem; they did not give ideas on what to fill the chapters with. The idea could be embodied in a story, put into a few pages, write that there was such and such a guy who wrote such and such a book, and then it was published, and he made a lot of money. But it was a story. Story! Not a book. No one has ever made money from stories, and not many have made money from books.
– I’ll write one chapter a day, and in about twenty days I’ll just finish it. – Peter thought, pondering his book. – The main thing is to have a desire to write. Although, perhaps, you should treat this as work, not wait for the desire to appear, but just write. But what if no lines are written at all? Give up everything? Admit to yourself that you are mediocre and have no literary inclinations? What about dreams? You won’t be able to come to terms with the fact that you will never have anything. Think about it, where else can you make money? You will end up as a loader at some factory, where you will work from morning to evening. And all that will happen in your life is a bottle of beer and computer games. – He put his head on the table. – No, you can’t do that, I have to think of something. I have to find a way to make a ton of money, but how?
My sister came into the kitchen. She had a textbook, notebook and pen in her hands.
– Help me do the math.
– Let’s go to.
Together they went to Peter’s room. The sister sat down in a chair and put the notebook on the table, giving the textbook to her brother. He took it and began to read the problem. Having read it completely, he comprehended everything that was said in it, and began to dictate a decision to his sister. She began to write it down in her notebook.
Peter was tired of standing with a textbook in his hands; he would rather sit down at the computer and continue working on the book, or at least search the Internet for some useful articles or blog posts that would help him write. He tried to solve problems from the textbook as quickly as possible, dictating solutions to his sister.
Having finished doing math, Christina got out from behind the computer and, taking a textbook and notebook, went to her room. Peter sat down in a chair. It was a moment of relief. He was so used to his chair that he received incredible pleasure from being in it. Everything in his room was done in such a way as to enjoy comfort, which Peter valued very much. He bought all his things when he worked at the factory. He worked there for a couple of months, and was just able to save money to buy a computer, a sofa, and a computer chair, not to mention other small things, such as a table, a bedside table and a carpet.
Working at the factory seemed like absolute hell to him. He hated the whole world when he was carrying heavy sheets of iron, or dragging them from the truck to the workshop. But there was nowhere to go. He woke up in the morning and, trying not to think about fatigue, went to work. Walking down the street, he tried not to notice cars and people who, as he believed,