My Muse Accepts Bribes

My Muse Accepts Bribes Etching

Ten Lies I Tell Myself to Keep Writing

I don’t believe in writer’s block. That’s for people who have the luxury of waiting for inspiration like it’s a delayed Uber. I get writer’s rerouting—when the story I planned takes a hard left into something I didn’t see coming. Sometimes it’s better. Sometimes it’s a complete disaster. Either way, I’m still writing.

My muse accepts bribes: snacks and deadlines.

Inspiration is bullshit. What actually works? Fear of missing a deadline and the promise of good cheese. My muse is less ethereal goddess, more raccoon in the garbage—opportunistic, motivated by immediate rewards, and surprisingly effective when properly incentivized.

Drafts aren’t bad; they’re just shy.

That first draft you hate? It’s not garbage. It’s just awkward and needs encouragement, like a teenager at their first dance. Stop expecting it to be charming and confident. It’s doing its best. Your job is to help it grow up, not murder it before it has a chance.

Perfection is a lobby. Publishing is the door.

You can hang out in the lobby forever, rearranging the furniture, adjusting the lighting, making sure everything is absolutely perfect. Or you can walk through the door and let people actually see your work. The lobby is comfortable. The lobby is safe. The lobby is also where dreams go to die of old age.

I outline like a control freak and edit like a pyromaniac.

Planning gives me the illusion of control. Editing is where I get to burn it all down and rebuild something better from the ashes. Some people are pantsers, some are plotters. I’m both, just at different stages, with different levels of chaos and destruction.

Creativity loves constraints the way plants love pots.

Give me infinite possibilities and I’ll stare at a blank page for three hours. Give me a 500-word limit, a prompt about disappointed houseplants, and a deadline in two days? I’ll write something. Constraints aren’t limitations—they’re scaffolding. They give you something to push against.

The Write Path is paved with tiny steps and big snacks.

Nobody writes a novel in one sitting. You write it in increments—200 words here, a scene there, maybe a whole chapter if you’re caffeinated and avoiding other responsibilities. Keep good snacks nearby. Hydrate. Celebrate small wins. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and marathons require fuel and realistic expectations.

I don’t chase trends; I give them a ride to the next idea.

By the time you’ve written a whole book about vampires or dystopian teenagers or whatever’s hot right now, the trend is over and everyone’s moved on to sentient houseplants or time-traveling accountants. Write what interests you. If it happens to be trendy, great. If not, at least you won’t be bored.

A daily prompt is a gym for your voice.

You don’t go to the gym once and expect abs. You don’t write one thing and expect to find your voice. Writing prompts are reps. Some days you’re lifting heavy, exploring new territory. Some days you’re just showing up and doing the work. Both matter.

The first paragraph pays the rent; the last paragraph leaves a tip.

Your opening has to hook readers—make them care enough to keep going. But your ending? That’s what they remember. That’s what makes them recommend your work to someone else, or come back for more. Don’t blow all your energy on the setup and then limp across the finish line. Stick the landing.

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These aren’t rules. They’re just things I tell myself when I’m staring at the blank page at 3 AM, wondering if I’ve wasted my life, questioning every choice that led me here. Sometimes they help. Sometimes I eat the snacks anyway and call it research.

The Write Kit Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Or don’t. I’ll still be here at 3 AM, rerouting.

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And Now a Fiction Break

Panic (Revised)

by Liz Dubelman

Lucy realized something was wrong while peeing.

Her morning routine was sacred: grab phone, check email on toilet, scroll Instagram while washing hands, apply makeup while watching TikTok tutorials she’d never actually follow. But this morning her email icon had no red bubble. No bubble at all. Just a blue envelope sitting there like some kind of digital corpse.

She tapped it. Empty. Not just no new emails—no emails at all. Not the spam about penis enlargement she never bothered to unsubscribe from, not the 3 AM messages from her boss, not even the confirmation for her dental appointment next Tuesday.

She was still sitting on the toilet when she opened Facebook. Blank white screen. Where her profile picture should have been—that perfect hair day, slightly overexposed from a high angle to make her skin look airbrushed—there was just a gray shadow with a question mark.

Lucy had paid $2.99 a month for the Kalm meditation app, so she knew how to breathe through panic. In through the nose, filling the belly. Out through the mouth. But what she wanted to do was scream.

She pulled up her pants and grabbed her laptop. Full signal strength. No internet. The wifi symbol sat there mocking her—a little black and white rainbow that connected to absolutely nothing.

Did she even exist without the internet? If there was no digital record of her life—no photos, no posts, no carefully curated evidence that she was interesting and had friends and went places—was she real?

She tried texting Missy, her best friend who knew everything about everything. But her text app was blank. Not just empty—erased. No thread with Zane from Bumble, no sister complaints, no confirmations, no proof of any human connection she’d ever made.

She dialed 911.

A spinning gear. Hope, maybe. Then: “ERROR PERFORMING REQUEST - UNKNOWN ERROR.” Below it, a white button with black text: “DISMISS.”

Like she could just dismiss this. Like this was some minor inconvenience and not the complete erasure of her entire identity.

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Lucy didn’t own a TV or radio or landline because who the fuck owned those things anymore? She was twenty-eight, not eighty. But standing in her apartment in UCSB flannels and her Nasty Woman t-shirt, she felt like she’d time-traveled to some pre-digital hellscape where people had to actually talk to each other.

She slipped on her earthquake Uggs—the ones she kept under the bed for disasters—and went outside.

The traffic lights were flashing red on all sides. The digital clock on the Wells Fargo building was a black rectangle, like a coffin for time itself. Lucy walked two blocks without looking at her phone, which was how she discovered the world was incredibly three-dimensional and also boring as hell.

An old woman walked two Shih Tzus in matching striped sweaters. Lucy wasn’t used to talking to non-relatives over forty, but desperation made people brave.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Lucy pointed at the flashing lights like they were some kind of code she’d never been taught to read.

The woman shrugged. “Power outage, maybe.” Then she bent down to let the dogs lick her face, which seemed disgusting but also weirdly comforting. Physical contact. Remember that?

Lucy’s heart pounded. She checked her dead phone again, pressing the home button rhythmically, like CPR. She hadn’t felt this rattled since her boss sent her to Toastmasters because she “needed to work on public speaking,” which was code for “you’re too awkward to be trusted with clients.”

The hospital loomed ahead—gray concrete, automatic doors, the kind of place where losing your mind seemed almost appropriate.

The ER was packed and operational. Fluorescent lights hummed. A man held a bloodied handkerchief to his ear. A woman argued with the receptionist about insurance. On the TV mounted high on the wall, a weather girl in a cocktail dress was “sending a special message to her Twitter followers,” which seemed like the least urgent thing happening in the world right now.

Then the anchors—gray-haired man, granddaughter-aged woman—appeared.

“The hacktivist group Panic has claimed responsibility for the early morning attack on a four-block area of Santa Monica,” he said. “All power, internet, and phone service have just been restored. Several tech giants are working on a patch to recover lost data. This patch will help secure the future.”

“Secure the future,” the woman repeated, like she was reading a commercial for anti-anxiety medication.

Lucy pulled out her phone. Pressed the home button with the kind of hope religious people probably feel when they pray.

There it was: her beach sunset background. The time. The date. She pressed again.

Everything had returned. 194 unread emails. A text from Zane: “what sup.” All her apps, including Kalm, which she’d definitely be leaving a five-star review for now that she remembered everything it taught her.

She walked home, staring at her phone, scrolling through her restored life. The traffic lights worked normally. The bank clock displayed the time. Everything was fine. Everything was back to normal.

Except Lucy couldn’t stop thinking about those forty-five minutes when she didn’t exist. When there was no proof she mattered, no evidence she was loved, no record of her carefully constructed digital self.

She opened Instagram and posted a selfie with the caption: “Just survived a total internet blackout! Crazy morning! 😱 #blessed #grateful #connectedagain”

Within three minutes, it had seventeen likes.

She felt real again.

But that night, lying in bed, waiting for the harp alarm she’d set for tomorrow, Lucy couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen something she wasn’t supposed to see. That for forty-five minutes, she’d glimpsed what her life actually was without the constant validation, the endless scroll, the digital proof that she existed.

It was a void.

And the scariest part? She had no idea how to fill it with anything real.