He has one hundred and forty-three documents titled some variation of "draft," "draft2," "draft_FINAL_actually," and not one of them has an ending, because somewhere around page four he always remembers that somebody, somewhere, already wrote this — better, first, with an actual spine.
Tonight it's a story about a man who can't finish things. He gets four hundred words in, a decent little hum going, and then it hits him, right on schedule: this has been written before. Bartleby wrote it. Kafka wrote it. Some guy on a forum in 2009 probably wrote it too, and did it in fewer words, and didn't need a metaphor about cursors to land the point.
He leans back. Admires his own restraint. Tells himself that recognizing a cliché before you commit it is basically its own kind of originality, a genre unto itself: The Unfinished. He is, by this metric, prolific.
He opens draft_FINAL_actually_2, deletes the first line, closes the laptop, and feels, for one clean second before the joke reloads, the particular quiet of a room where nothing was ever going to get made anyway — not because it had been done before, but because finishing it would mean someone could finally tell him it wasn't good enough.
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