The Well Is Dry

Tonight, the well being the source of my inspirations. I wanted to write about the frogs and toads and centipedes at the bottom of the well, how their silvery sharpness throws back the blind eye of the full moon, how very much I want to catch one of them and make it sing its song and how I cannot because no ladder reaches that bottom and in any case the well is dry.

The well is dry which means that my writing is parched and creaky and no topic pokes me in my tired froggy eyes and the moon isn't full or even gibbous (what an awful word, sounding like something in the slobbery mouth of a gibbon). Now write all that again without adjectives.

Can you tell that I have been reading books of advice for aspiring writers? Whatever their benefit to others, I think that I should stay the hell away from them. The ones that are most dangerous to me are those which tell us how to fish for the perfect word, the true sentence, the noblest paragraph. Those books make me despair.