Great-aunt Jemima
Everybody and their great-aunt Jemima is writing an amazing bestseller these days, which promptly flies right off the charts and straight into amazondotcom land. Shortly thereafter, having sold movie rights to Hollywood for obscene amounts that run out of zero-space on the average calculator, the celebrated new author, along with great-aunt Jemima no doubt, likely retire to a life of lotus-eating bliss on some quietly decadent Caribbean island.
What's worse is, in a majority of these cases, writing was not even a small part of their job description.
So now, imagine that you've been writing for a living for the last 3000 years, like I have. Over the centuries, you and your muse have developed a tenuous and fragile co-dependency, bordering on the phobic. You are also, for some strange reason, increasingly fascinated with snails and three-toed sloths.
You are no longer gobsmacked at these hordes of people who so prolifically toss off books, like so many peanuts at one sitting. Your awe-tank is now running on empty, and nothing surprises you any more. You have evolved, from awe-full to hope-less, in one fell swoop.
You've stopped marvelling at where they get their ideas from. You've stopped banging your head repeatedly against the wall, bleating, "oh SHIT I wish I'd thought of that!". You've lost count of the number of times you've yelped, "Noooo, I don't BELIEVE it, that's the EXACT same storyline I've been developing the last 5 years and somebody already wrote the book and turned it into a screenplay!"
Instead, you sit down to write something...anything. All you get is a big blank expanse of screen, leering at you. You rediscover the 'Format' tab. You click on the 'columns' option and tell yourself it might work if you tried to write 3 words per column instead of 500 words per page. You run dry at Column 5.
Change of tactic. You try Yoga to loosen the Muse. You do 7 tequila shots and throw yourself into the pool at 2 am. You turn out all the lights and put on loud rave music, which you hate, to scare the Muse out into the open. There is a definite desperate edge to the snailwatching, you realize.
Okay, time to try it backwards. You bring out your best visualization toolkit. You close your eyes and imagine you've already FINISHED writing the book. You see the title up in flashing lights. Damn. Those lights are so bright you can't even read it. Try it without the lights. No good. You can't even visualize a title into being.
Never mind, keep on with the visualizing...but hang on...you don't WANT it to be justanotherbook, do you??? Hell, NO!!!
Damn. Start over. Calm down, deep breaths...and suddenly, you just KNOW you're on the verge of a major breakthrough. You are thinking of ways to make it an un-book. Why not print it as a book of tear-off biodegradable brown bags, printed with vegetable pigments, so they serve a functional purpose and are eco-friendly too? Read it, use the brown bags when you're done, and then compost them!
You consider printing it on napkins, so you can read through dinner, then use the napkin. No, no good, nobody uses a whole pack of napkins at one meal, and who wants to wait till dinner tomorrow for the next page?
Maybe a book in sms-format? Since mobile phone screens are still small, it would have to be a book-in-50-words. So you could read it on the go. Now THAT could work! ANYONE could write 50 words! I just DID!!!