No meat for the bread.

She swung back and forth on the computer chair for what seemed like a very long time, thinking what on earth to write about. She felt the creative energy, the yearning for some elaborate description, straining for release but there was no outlet. For the first time, her imagination had failed her. This was a turning point.

Maybe if she wrote in the third person, she thought, it would birth some idea. If she played Text Twist on the computer, some word could spark inspiration. Her mind was a dry oasis of blandness. How unfair it was that during waking hours, when the brain is supposedly most stimulated, she could not conjure a single tool to aid in her writing. The more she forced it, the more awful the product of her efforts:

"If stars were flies, the sky would be the most majestic of spiderwebs."

And such garbage. 

How does the night bring about such originality of thought? Those nights during which, tossing and turning, she strained to attract sleep, when the most lucid of thoughts occurred. Which led her to think, is there something about that half-conscious state of mind that helps us tap into unexplored areas of our minds? We only use ten percent of our brains. What if there was a way to access beyond that, something more? That statistic made her analyze the true confines of our limited imaginations. 

No wonder all she could produce was a half-hearted comparison of stars and flies. 

Misery, she concluded, was the best inspiration. Proof was inked into history's highest respected literature. A lack of misery was bad news for a prospective writer. She found that she didn't care much for this observation, however, because having recovered from a very deep, very recent bout of misery, she had no intention nor any desire to revisit it. 

So what to do? 

She took a bath. And read a book. Marvelled at the intricate plots, the beautiful linguistics, the literary devices. She was jealous.