1. Start with the feeling, and follow the feeling through the woods of distraction until you see the idea that you're intending to write. Move carefully— but not too carefully. Jostling something loose from the trees is often an unintentional joy. 2. Once you've got the idea in your sights, you can sit back and breathe for a moment. You must let it sit alone, in the middle of the tall grass, thinking that it is alone, unobserved. That it is just sitting there under the gray furrows of your skull's sky, contemplating the light breeze across its flesh. 3. You take your shot, but you are unpracticed, and your stumble alerts the idea to your presence. 4. In a rush of feathers and electricity, the chimerical entity vanishes, leaving a small pucker in the air behind it. 5. You weep, for every time an idea escapes your assiduous arrow, you age another year.
1. Start with the terror. Begin with the clenching that originates in the top of your chest, the one you get every night when you're lying in bed trying to sleep and you breathe in a deep, hitching sigh that has become involuntary these past few years. 2. Investigate the fear like a spelunker with a dying lantern. Cave by shrinking cave. Until you reach the end, or wake up.
1. Ghost 2. Illness came up the throat like a blade, rasping, and his sputum was red-flecked, stained the inside of the sink for days before he died. He tried to remind people that he was going to die, but they kept forgetting. 3. When he finally went, it was in a patch of sunlight, on the floorboards of his bedroom, having curled in on himself. 4. When they found him, his face was frozen in contorted rictus, mouth splayed wide open and teeth bared as if in on a horrific cosmic joke. 5. The man's ghost tried to haunt those who remained, but no one remembered anyone he'd been.