The gaiety of the ball swirled all around me. Girls in elaborate gowns danced with boys wearing well-fitted suits to the crescendo of the orchestra. Others stood around and gossiped about the latest scandals.
It was an event exclusively for all the most important people, with scenes of excess and debauchery disguised with the veneer of sophistication and wealth. Someone laughs at a joke that wasn’t funny, another makes fun of people for the things that they also do themselves, and they proclaim the champagne to be “of the highest quality” only because of its price.
A girl I knew asked me to dance and I obliged, but my heart wasn’t in it, so I let her lead. We danced to three songs and then sat down to catch our breath. She asked if I had heard about some salacious rumour and began telling me all about it without invitation. I nodded along to what she said, but I wasn’t really listening, as it was much the same drama only with different actors.
I looked around the room, seeing people arguing and laughing and....

What now?

He looked at the half-filled page on his desk. Ideas swirled around his mind, but nothing fully formed. He stared at the page, spinning the pen in his hand, waiting to be struck by some stroke of inspiration.
He read what he had written. He liked the voice of the character, the misanthropic sarcasm. But what else should happen? Why does the character deride everything? What is the point of this story? If the author has so many questions, what would someone else think?
The last question made him stop. He put his pen down and reread the story.
Was the voice even that good? Is he just seeing qualities that aren’t there? Is the story worth continuing? Maybe it had run its course. Maybe he should throw it away and start anew....

“What to write?”

She broke off, her pen hovering above the page.
“Should he go on ruminating?” She thought. “Or should he just give up hope?”
She let the pen fall from her hand and closed the book, wanting the unfinished story out of sight. The book was filled with unfinished stories. Characters stuck without endings.
“Maybe I should change the way I write,” she wondered. “What I do now just leads to—”. She looked at the book. She opened it and flipped through the pages. A man catching a train, a girl talking to her mother over the telephone, someone visiting a stranger’s home.
“What is the point of these?”
She read one of the unfinished stories. She remembered writing it, but the words seem foreign to her. The handwriting didn’t even seem like her own, rather someone else trying to imitate it. It’s a strange sensation, reading your words when they seem like someone else’s.
She closed the book again and threw it to the side of her desk.
“Another story unfinished. Maybe for the next one I should work backwards, come up with an ending, and figure out how it should start....”

What next?

He stopped writing, unable to decide. He thought, “what could she do now?” (1). He put down his pen and tossed the loose pages to the side of the desk (2). He got up, walked across the room, and sat by the window. He wondered, “maybe she could do what she says, and write a story backwards?” (3). He thought about going for a walk to clear his head, but the overcast sky warned him not to. He looked across the room at the half-filled pages (4). He decided to risk getting wet anyway—”it’s only water”. He went over to his closet and grabbed his jacket. He (5) pulled on his shoes, not bothering to undo and retie the laces. Heading outside, he hoped it wouldn’t rain, or rain too hard....

What to do?

She stopped typing. Resting her head on her left hand, she looked around the library. There were people scattered around the tables, staring at laptop screens, typing away at whatever they were doing. A few tables across, a group of friends were making more noise than they had the right to. She blamed this distraction for her inability to write.
Looking at the bookshelf directly across from her, she studied the names on the clothbound books. They were mostly works by unfamiliar names, but sticking out like a fire in the night was the name Shakespeare.
Staring at the name printed on the book’s spine, she thought about how Shakespeare composed his works. She liked to imagine it was easy for him. That he didn’t pause for a second to think of what the next word should be. That his hand flowed in an uninterrupted motion as he wrote, only stopping when he knew the work was finished. She knew it probably wasn’t true. But the idea of Shakespeare’s ease comforted her. She didn’t know why, just that it did.
Turning back to her story, she still didn’t know what to write....

What shall come next?

He dropped his pen and leaned back in his chair.
“And what now?” he spoke out loud. “Is this supposed to just continue ad infinitum? And what does the author of this part expect from me? To just bemoan my inability to write anything else? And what is the plan of the final author? All they seem to be doing is projecting their faults and uncertainties onto a series of ‘authors’. The story could have ended with any of these sections, yet here we are. Are they just going to keep going until they can’t think of a new variation of the first sentence?....”

Maybe I went one too many?

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1 The characters ask this question too much.
2 All these locations seem the same, like they’re all occurring in different instances of the same room.
3 Maybe they could talk about things other than their failed stories.
4 Must everyone handwrite their stories?
5 Too many of these sentences begin with “he”.