into it. Closing the pan with a lid, he went to get a mug to pour some coffee.
My head was empty. No ideas, no interesting thoughts, nothing at all, just an empty desire to drink coffee and eat scrambled eggs.
Taking a mug from the table, Peter poured sugar and coffee into it, after which he poured hot water from the kettle, which had just boiled, over everything and stirred thoroughly. Leaving the mug on the table, he took milk out of the refrigerator, added a little to the coffee, put the bottle back in the refrigerator, and once again stirred the coffee, which was now with milk.
He sat down on a chair and took a few small sips from his mug. Fried eggs were sizzling in the frying pan. Taking the plastic remote control, Peter turned on the TV. One of the channels was showing his favorite series about witches. He thought that he could also write something about witches, but this had already happened, and it turned out that he did not invent anything of his own, but only borrowed other people’s ideas.
– Where do all these writers get their ideas? Am I really so mediocre that I can’t come up with anything interesting? – thought Peter.
Leaving the coffee mug on the table, he went into the room to turn on the computer. Having pressed the button on the system unit, he returned back to the kitchen and turned off the gas under the frying pan. The scrambled eggs were ready. He put it on a small plate, after which he took ketchup out of the refrigerator and squeezed some into the scrambled eggs. Putting the bottle of ketchup back in the refrigerator, Peter took a plate of scrambled eggs, a mug of coffee, and went into the room.
The computer booted.
Peter sat down in the computer chair, put breakfast on the table, and connected the Internet. Going to his social network page, he looked at the messages. There were no new ones. Breaking off a piece of scrambled eggs, he stuck it on a fork and put it in his mouth, beginning to chew thoroughly.
– I should probably wash my face. – Peter thought when his drooping eyes began to prevent him from reading posts in social network groups.
Leaving the scrambled eggs and coffee on the table, he went to the bathroom, where he thoroughly washed his face and brushed his teeth. Returning to the computer, he continued his breakfast.
There wasn’t much to read. There was nothing new in the news, and the jokes that were published in the groups were repeated again and again, and each time they became less and less funny.
Peter quickly ate the scrambled eggs, washed it down with coffee, and took the plate to the kitchen, putting it in the sink. Returning to his room and sitting down at the computer, he tried to think about the book he had started writing. He opened the office program in which he had written the first paragraph of the book and re-read it. To his disappointment, he did not find anything brilliant or talented 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
