Writer’s Block in Prose

Smelting gold from castaway words, I weave writer's block into a crucible of rebirth.

I wander a barren Desert of writer’s mental block, a castaway amid towering dunes of ash. Here, the silence screams louder than my magnesium quill's snap. It speaks of pages long torn away, of ink that bleeds from my open wounds, of fractured thoughts strewn like detritus on a naked shore of apprehension.

Anxiety's relentless wave crashes my brain, the perturbation stripping the flesh from my dreams and leaving only the echoes of what once was: What burns in the ash of my words? My mind—and it’s a reverberating ruin choking on half-formed sentences, orphaned ideas that cower in the shadow of my Desert muse. Yet, in silence, my betraying lover whispers her secrets in my ears, saying that each grain of sand is a spark and each echo is a seed. "Why not smelt this Desert's orphans into gold?" she asks. I take from the wreckage an orphaned thought, and an ember quickly flares. It's faint but fierce, and a promising pyre ignites to forge my words into thoughts anew.

This Desert is no grave; it's my crucible. Now, my magnesium quill, scorching, unyielding, scratches at the void, stirring tides of ink that pulse like the pricking of stars in the night sky. What was cast away now returns, not as detritus, not as blank papers, but as flames, alchemized into verses that sing of my ruin and rebirth. I listen, and silence bows, now expelling its secrets that are mine to wield.
—Noisy Wren, ’25