I’m sitting in the peace and quiet of our local library. With my jacket and beanie on as it’s freezing outside, I found a book that may help me write my next story.

I’m a hopeless creative writer. Abysmally hopeless.

I need to learn to write not as myself but through a character. My problem is that I’m so “inside myself” that I cannot project some other voice through another character. There’ll always be my voice that comes through.

And I don’t like that.

At the door of the library, there’s a stand of bookmarks and booklets. I picked up one advertising the My Brother Jack Prize – an annual prize for short stories through our local Council.

I’m thinking of submitting another story again this year.

Last year’s story based on a young disabled man who had a talent with morse code using a handmade radio receiver and taking place during Melbourne’s blackout during World War 2 didn’t get a mention.

That’s okay at least I submitted something.

I keep thinking that there’s a bigger story or novel there because the local history is relatively unknown (it only came out recently as there was a government block on it for many decades after the war due to its high level of national security and secrecy). The thing is, I have no idea how to progress it. I get stuck because I have to imagine what life would have been like during the 1940s in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

I’m flicking through this writing book and wondering how I need ideas to start writing a short story. I need to make a start with something and then just….write.

So let’s see. I might just make something up on the go. I’m someone who likes to plan everything out except this time, there is NO plan.

Maybe it’s just time to change my modus operandi?

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Later: I drive back home and during the drive I come up with an outline of a short story that I could submit. Even a name for the character.

Taking place in the near future after the literature book bans and burns of 2025, a curious brown and battered journal with scribbling of various dates is found by the reader. It tells the story of the journal owner and author, Viktor, (with a K) who laments the loss and the gaping void he feels when society around him slowly loses the ability to have eye contact with him.

The name Viktor came to me while driving the car and when I looked into the name, it came up with a character from the game League of Legends. Viktor (the LoL character) devotes his life to the advancement of humankind and believes that only by embracing a glorious evolution of technology can humanity’s full potential be realised.

Wow. Pertinent. I thought. Viktor it is. I’ll make him the OPPOSITE of this League of Legends character! I’m going to make him sensitive, an artist, an empath.

The story is going to be written in the style of Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night A Traveller…

AND NO, I DID NOT USE CHATGPT TO CREATE THIS BLOODY OUTLINE.

I DID IT ALL MYSELF.

FROM MY HEAD.

SO THERE.