Prayer Upon Arriving Again At The Writing Section Of The Local Bookstore

Dear Father in Heaven,

God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,

Who doth provide for His followers

in their time of desperate need,

let there be a new one.

Let there be a New Release, oh Merciful God,

a new book of invaluable writing advice,

a book filled with never-before-revealed methods,

and long-hidden tips,

and all the cruelly-kept secrets of the Great Novelists,

so that I might write a great novel myself

in only a year,

or maybe thirty days,

or at least the first fifty pages,

for I have consumed all the others

and still I am hungry,

and starving for direction,

and so I pray to thee, O Lord,

let there be as many prompts

within its mostly blank exercise pages

(I don’t know how they get away with that)

as there are bits of the novel manuscript

which I fed into a shredder last night, O Lord,

for lo, I am as wretched

as the huddled woman beside me

flipping through Save the Cat Writes a Novel,

as I, in my terrible darkness,

a beggar without choice,

look for guidance on writing to Stephen King,

whose writing I think is just dreadful.

Of course I beseech You, O Lord, to hear my prayer,

and to see to it, in Your mercy,

that nowhere in this holiest of books

will there be the usual mention of Early Man

telling stories around the fucking campfire, O Lord,

anything but that, Creator of the World,

for Early Man did not have to deal with Amazon book reviews

nor Goodreads, O Blessed Father,

nor with sensitivity readers,

nor with short attention spans,

for if they did, Oh Lord, they would surely have jumped into the fire pit themselves

and spared us the bother of existence;

nor shall it reference Star Wars

when speaking of structure,

nor Groundhog Day

when discussing character arcs,

nor any film at all, oh Lord,

for surely I shall tear my eyeballs out right here

in the back aisle,

beside the dictionaries and quotations books,

across from the toilets

which are out of order.

Have mercy, oh Lord,

and let not other customers discover me here,

for when they do,

I shall surely pretend I am lost,

and looking for the Colleen Hoover section,

“They said it was right here,”

so they will know not my wretchedness,

nor follow me from here

to the Literary Criticism section,

where I shall continue to search for answers,

and find there only more reasons

to blind myself.

Hear, O Lord, this poor writer’s prayer,

and deliver unto me a book of literary revelations

so that I shall know how Shakespeare Shakespeared,

and how Dickens Dickensed,

and how Carver Carvered,

though you knowest all truth, All-Knowing One,

and You knowest that I don’t really love Shakespeare,

nor can I stand Dickens,

and that Carver doth make me want to blow my fucking head off,

but I would like to be as respected as them, O Lord,

and for people to wonder,

one blessed future day,

how Shalom Shalomed,

or how Auslander Auslandered.

But most of all, Dear God.

have mercy upon me,

and let this humble servant realize, lo after this many years,

that there are no solutions here

in these glossy exclamation-marked offerings,

and that the only problem is that I think there is a problem,

that others before me didn’t stumble blindly down this same rock-strewn road,

and may it be thy will, Oh Lord,

that one day someone will take a book from these shelves

and the wise teller of secrets will offer,

somewhere within its cheerful pages,

as a shining example of the art of prose itself,

something I wrote, Oh Lord,

when at last I gave up looking for answers

and accepted, for lack of anything better,

the strange beating

of my own peculiar heart.

Amen.

Yours in the fetal position,

S.

illustrations by orli auslander