Twilight Sparkle Gets Writer's Block

by SerenityViewer

Rating: everyone
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 1301

When the fountains of creativity run dry, Twilight Sparkle will face a common foe to all writers.

Friendship Reports? Piece of cake, declares one studious Twilight Sparkle. Wrap a moral around a few choice paragraphs, and you earn your weekly rent.

Yet when the fountains of creativity run dry, Twilight Sparkle will be introduced to the common foe of all writers big and small . . .

Published 2012-08-13 11:54:01 UTC
Last updated 2012-08-13 11:54:01 UTC

Frustration . . .

Frustration . . .

TWILIGHT SPARKLE GETS WRITER'S BLOCK

“Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.”

- Charles Bukowski

The unwritten words mocked her from beyond the threshold of her subconscious.

She tried again and again to lure them out onto the blank sheet of paper before her, yet all her efforts collapsed into oblivion. Hours of doodling, scene sketching, brainstorming, and drooling at the ceiling proved to be fruitless.

Twilight clawed at her eyes and groaned.

Legions of braincells had been wasted upon the gates of Castle Writersblock, the fortress living up to it's name. The paperphobic ideas stuck stubbornly to the defenses of their impenetrable walls, showering her with useless nouns and blunted verbs.

She bit her lip. She could always begin as usual . . .

She raised her quill, plunged it into a dark pool of ink, and hovered it over the target area, an unstained patch in the top left corner.

She paused.

The ink-soaked end stood poised as a saber, ready to dive headfirst into the heart of the page. Yet hesitation prevented such a meeting, the quill trembling mere centimeters above. The wasted seconds hammered at her resolve, and her mind went to pieces.

Just do it! Dear Princess Celestia . . .

No.

It was too predictable, too plain, too ugly to grace her letter. The quill beat a hasty retreat to the comfort of the wooden desk, and now rested there once more. There was a growing black bloodstain where the unused ink dripped off the nib and splattered onto the oak panel.

And so another attempt was dead, stillborn before it could see the light of day.

She sighed and glanced around the room, her senses soaking in every detail.

Her mind emptied as her ears attuned to the steady beat of the wall-mounted clock. The echos filled her world, washing aside all other thoughts as her cognitive functions slowed to a crawl. The blinks came in measured steps, her lungs rationing the air as her heartbeat hushed it's racket; the sounds of a light drizzle filling her head where rolling thunder used to be.

She floated in peace, rising and falling with the tidal waves as she took a directionless path through her mind.

A thought flashed through her like lightning. Her mouth quickened into sickening grin, the kind reserved for pumpkins on Nightmare Night.

A lavender glow lashed out across the room and lassoed a thesaurus from the bookshelves, dragging the unfortunate tome to the waiting clutches of the diminutive purple monster.

Thesauruses solve everything.

Her Messiah now cradled in her hooves, she parted the ancient tome and released the moths that had been trapped within the dusty pages for untold millenia. She creased the yellow-stained pages with delicate care, and a vault of golden words gleamed back at her. Nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives offered themselves eagerly, and she went about rummaging through the wealthy catalog, at times grabbing two words and analyzing each with a critical eye.

Her horn glowed and she reached for her tools once more.

Scribbles, scribbles and more furious scribbles. Smoke trailed from her quill as she carved away at the page, raising a fine dust above the construction zone where she assembled together choice words and etched them unto the paper column. There was no turning back now.

“THERE!” she roared into the empty room. The Modern Equestrian Dictionary glanced in her direction from it's perch atop the shelves, as did a number of other reference guides. The thesaurus absorbed all the attention, beaming with pride.

She ignored their stares and looked over her work, eyes teeming with excitement.

Greetings Crowned Head Celestia,

Presently I have ascertained an appropriate instruction concerning the Sorcery of Companionship: I was so aghast of being scrutinized as a pompous couth that I adumbrated a constituent of my existential quintessence. My acquaintances succored me to be cognizant of the concedable action to be eminent in one's adroitness, and that there are certain allotments when it is apropos to exposition them . . .

Twilight groaned and shoved the garbage away from her.

Maybe if I changed . . .

Impossible. Not even Star-Swirl the Bearded could have drilled through this dense mumbo jumbo.

She sprang at her letter with delirium in her eyes; mashing, crushing and chewing the traitorous paper while her thesaurus cowered behind the ink pot. A moment later a soggy missile burned up in reentry on it's way to the garbage bin.

She levitated another piece of paper and placed it before her.

It was blank.

Her forehead made the sudden realization that it had not yet been introduced to the friendly wooden desk. Twilight was all too happy to make the necessary arrangements.

A loud slam rocked her desk, and her eyebrows began to converse with the wooden workspace about mundane topics like the weather, the crazy unicorn thrashing about the room, and whatnot. The ashes of her recently crumbled letter jumped into the conversation from the waste bin, speaking in prose that would have stricken a Canterlot pony green with jealousy.

She filtered them out, dragging her eyes across the growth rings that decorated the desk.

Its hopeless.

She sank into a dark abyss, her soul absorbed into the wooden finish; her essence bleeding onto the floor from her garish wounds. This would be her tomb. 'Here Lies Twilight Sparkle: Assassinated On This Day By a Mr. W. Block.'

Spike waddled past. A window creaked open.

The dragon departed the room, muttering something that Twilight didn't quite hear.

Muttering something.

Sputtering something.

Sputtering unheard words.

She looked back at her unwritten letter, the sparks of creativity igniting a fire in her core. A warmth glowed in her bowels, the flame thawing the ice that had seized her imagination. The frozen dam broke, and Spring pushed it's way on through to the outside world.

The gears turned, and the dusty old mill spun into motion, winding up to a rhythmic tempo.

Muttering, sputtering, uttering; tossing meaningless words into the air.

The sounds from beyond the open window trickled into the stale room; foals leaping in every direction chasing an unseen ball, lifelong friends chatting away over cakes and brewed teas. She could hear the rays of the sun shining down on the town, brightening every face and coloring every mouth with laughter.

Tossing, flinging, offering; words drifted through the room, unheeded.

She raised her quill.

The furniture cheered her on, the books nodding in approval amidst the thunderous applause erupting from the kitchen utensils.

All urged her on; all that is, save for one.

Her opponent stood it's ground, the blank page staring back eternity and mortality. Yet now she did not see an evil ogre, a mythical rampaging creature that devoured everything in it's wake. A beast that existed only to be despised and slain.

Now she saw promise hidden in that ocean of white. Potential glistened off the empty page, it's spaces waiting to be filled with something meaningful.

She saw not a fiendish giant, but a wise, worthy foe; one what was there to teach her and not harm her.

Her quill struck the paper and they commenced their duel, the thoughts flowing from both the nib of the quill and her mouth.

“Dear Princess Celestia . . .”

Outside, the day progressed and light gave way to darkness as the night took hold.

In the second story window of a library of a certain town, a candle glowed; an ember kindled by the passionate scribbles of it's owner. The wax ran in thick, sticky tears down the length of the candle as Twilight burned the midnight oil.

The written words complimented the new ones emerging from beyond the edge of her subconscious.