A Twist in the Tale
(a.k.a. Writing a Voyager Short Story with a Writer's
Block)
A short story by Lt. Taya 17
Janeway
Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap.
The sound of her fingernail clicking impatiently
against her glass table seemed to resonate throughout the empty room. She
stared blankly at her screen, pondering the four words she had written so far
in about as many hours:
A Voyager Short Story.
That was it. The sum of her productivity for the
past four hours. The damned thing didn't even have a proper name.
She'd never thought she'd sink to this level of
boredom when she was confined home for one entire week, but here she was.
Writing Voyager stories, of all
things. What a waste of time- who was she going to show them to anyhow? Not to
mention the slight silliness she felt in writing such… puerile (for the want of
a better name) material.
What the hell
had she been thinking when she started on this?
She had some obscure form of the flu that nobody
had ever heard of and nobody even bothered to inoculate anymore. Or, at least,
that was about as much as she could make out from what the Doctor (she always
thought of her doctor as the doctor,
with a capital D- she couldn't help it) said. He'd sent her home with a couple
of drugs and a long directive of things to do and things NOT to do: no going
outdoors, no sleeping late, no chocolate and no coffee(!) no strenuous
activity, no working at home (don't you dare,
he had threatened)…
He might have saved himself a lot of energy by just
saying, "Stay at home and stare at a wall all day."
Well, he certainly couldn't expect her to sit
watching newsreels and daytime soap operas all day. She gazed, somewhat
ruefully, at the rectangular screen mounted on her wall. On bad days she liked
to call it the telescreen and imagine that some dictatorial Big Brother was out
there monitoring everything she watched. Well, not like there was much to watch
in the first place. Entertainment these days was sensationalism on growth
hormones and nothing much else. She'd go nuts if she just sat there watching
twenty-four/seven-- she needed to use her brain every now and then.
Then it had occurred to her to embark on this
misguided endeavor. Sure, now that Voyager
was back in the Alpha Quadrant people weren't that interested in it anymore,
but she knew there was still a market out there of people (fanatics, really,
considering some of them whom she
either knew or had met) who would spare more than a few moments for stories
like these. And well… it had seemed like an interesting idea. Writing a
biography was easy. Fiction, on the other hand… didn't she always like to
challenge herself?
The tapping continued unabated.
Challenge.
You got that right. How about impossibility?
She rolled her eyes. What was wrong with her? She'd never been at a loss for words in real life,
so why was she stuck now?
"Maybe if I just wrote a sentence the rest of the
story will follow."
It was
just another ordinary day on the Starship Voyager. Commander Chakotay was on
his way down to the Mess Hall when…
when…
when…
Um.
…the ship
suddenly rocked violently.
No. Too typical, too unoriginal. She needed
something unusual.
[backspace][backspace][backspace][backspace]
…he ran
into Naomi Wildman, knocking her over.
Cruelty to children. That was bad- wouldn't go down
to well with most readers. So. What else?
[backspace][backspace][backspace][backspace]
…Q
suddenly appeared in a typical flash of light.
Disgusting. She wouldn't even touch that topic.
[backspace][backspace][backspace][backspace]
… he
realized he'd forgotten to put on his pants.
She had to laugh out loud at that one. Simply
ridiculous! It just went to show how far-gone her mind was. She had bounced
from being boring, to cruel, to disgusting, to just plain idiotic. What kind of
medicine had the Doctor prescribed
for her anyhow?
"Alright, alright, I admit it! This isn't working.
So what do you want me to do now?" Talking
to oneself is often considered a sign of insanity…
She sighed and leaned back in her overstuffed
chair, blowing air between her lips in frustration. Her living room was done in
spartan, almost ascetic décor: everything was in shades of black and white,
leaving nothing particularly interesting for her to fix her eyes on. She tried
to recall long-forgotten Literature classes. What were the key components in
every piece of work? Conflict, buildup, climax, conclusion… it wasn't really
helping. Especially not when she heard the stentorian tones of her English
teacher insidiously sneaking into her thought train ("No grasp of literary
techniques whatsoever… can't even employ proper metaphors…")
What if she wrote a story about the captain of Voyager trying to get over her writer's
block when trying to write a Voyager
short story?
Now, who would read that? No plot whatsoever. ("Have you ever heard of the concept of suspense? What I am supposed to do
with students like these, I ask you!")
Shaking her head and conceding defeat, she decided
to fall back on what had sustained her through her first six years of
schooling- the good old brainstorm. She stood up and pushed the chair aside,
heading for the patio. Last evening she'd tried to paint the sunset, but the
sun had set too quickly for her to finish more than a third of the landscape,
so she'd just abandoned the half-completed drawing, standing forlornly outside
the house. She grabbed a piece of paper from the easel, and scrabbled in the
tin container beside it for a charcoal stick. Messy, but it served its purpose.
This time she sat cross-legged on the thick carpet
where the coffee table was. She put the paper down and scrawled across the
middle: Brainstorming for Voyager story
ideas.
She studied her handiwork and decided she didn't
like her handwriting. It was too mousy, and it looked like a series of chicken
scratches. Thankfully she typed- or worked in typeface- more than she wrote.
All hail the stylus, greatest invention of mankind.
She started drawing categories and sub-categories:
"Romance", "Incredibly Mushy Romance", "Incredibly Mushy and Explicitly Graphic
Romance"(There is no way I am ever
touching that, she thought as she wrote it), "Suspense",
"Mystery/Romance", "Fantasy"(Now, what would that be about, Voyager
accidentally ending up in a Tolkien novel?), "Science fiction"… wait, science
fiction? Did she actually write that? What was today, the Day For Stating the
Blindingly Obvious? She stared at the sheet of paper, now beginning to look
like a storm had really hit it. "I
cannot believe people make a living out of writing these stories," she grumped
out loud. Well, not really, but it was close. Shaking her head, she began scribbling
down various ideas she'd thought of while trying to list the categories.
Five hours later she crumpled up the scribbled
piece of paper in frustration and tossed it into the metal bin. "I am not doing
this. It is a waste of my time, and I will be much better off reading
scientific journals," she proclaimed, and went back to her workstation, banging
her knee painfully on the underside of the coffee table as she stood up (it just isn't my day, is it…).
Five minutes later she was back, guiltily fishing
the crumpled ball of paper out from the bin and smoothing it out. "I have got to finish this. I said that I
would, and I am going to."
She sat back down at the coffee table and marked
out three of the most promising plot lines she had come up with. One of them
was a sappy romance story about Tom and B'Elanna (Rolls eyes dramatically, she thought), the other was an adventure
flick about (what else?) a misinformed and misguided alien culture mistaking Voyager for bad guys, and the third was
a disgustingly pointless comedic piece about another one of Neelix's cooking
disasters.
She re-examined the three plots again, trying to
see how well each would fit into her Literature teacher's model story, while
trying to screen out the derogatory remarks which accompanied the pointers.
Finally she decided that the adventure story would be the simplest to write.
Well, nine
hours have passed, and now the actual writing starts! How exciting…
With the sad-looking sheet of paper beside her she
sat in front of the computer screen and began typing, tentatively at first, but
as she continued her writing gained momentum. Her story was a short epic
extolling the bravery, courage and camaraderie of Voyager crew. As she typed she could hear the voice of her
Literature teacher going ballistic in her head, but she pointedly ignored it.
The supposed two-page long story stretched over ten pages, and kept going.
By the time she had finished with the story she
quite liked it. It was also ten p.m., and she knew she was going to get a scolding
from the Doctor about it. No matter. She added a few finishing touches, saved
the file, and attached a short message to it (something along the lines of I was high when I wrote this, please read it
no matter how silly it sounds and tell me what you think. Well, slightly
more eloquently than that, but the meaning was the same). There. Finished.
She
accessed her personal mail account and sent it to everyone on her mailing list.
Now, all she had to do was to wait for them to start calling her, or worse still,
start coming over with a psychiatrist to check her mental health.
She stretched and decided that she felt quite
tired. Perhaps a long soak in a tub full of boiling hot water was in order. She
pushed the screen of her workstation shut, and got up to run the said boiling
hot water into the tub. Hmm. Maybe she'd play some light jazz music while she
bathed, just to celebrate. And she was going to spend at least half an hour in
that tub, nevermind that she would come out looking like a wrinkled ninety-year
old prune after that. She'd been working for twelve solid hours: she needed to
relax now.
When she came out of the bathroom half an hour
later with a towel wrapped around her freshly washed hair (and yes, looking
like a wrinkled ninety-year old prune), there was a message flashing on her
console. So. Somebody had read it already? Hiding a smile she opened the
message. It was short, to the point, and typed in very large font.
KATHRYN, YOU HAVE OBVIOUSLY TAKEN TOO MUCH OF
WHATEVER THE DOCTOR HAS GIVEN YOU. GET SOME SLEEP AND SEE HIM FIRST THING
TOMORROW MORNING.
SIGNED,
CHAKOTAY
(I LIKED THE STORY, BY THE WAY)
She laughed. More messages were flashing on her
screen now: from B'Elanna, Seven, the Doctor… probably ranting about her
staying up so late when she should have been asleep. No matter. She was feeling
an odd sense of achievement at the moment. It had taken her the whole day, but
so what? She'd finally written her first Voyager
story. In the background she could hear her Literature teacher still going at maximun
volume ("Kathryn Janeway, if you ever get the absurd idea of publishing fiction, all your readers are
going to throw up all over your
writing! What kind of metaphor is "the beach of life"? ad nauseam, ad
infinitum) It might have taken her
forty years, but she had finally proved her teacher wrong. Like anything else,
she could write if she put her mind
to it.
"So, when do you think should I write my next
magnum opus?"
The End
