earlier, i totally had an idea of something to write about... however, things being as they are, it is now later. so, there are no ideas. besides this one--which is basically just to write about not having anything to write about and to use a lot of adverbs to do so. my prose is tortured and overwrought. it is wandering and pointless. i have exited any levels of poignant-ness i may have been on or descending through on my way to meaninglessness.
i started compiling ideas for what will be another embarrassingly bad piece of fiction which i will ultimately be too fearful to even try to write out in full. i don't really think there ever have been any very good writers of fiction--maybe nabokov--but how much of LOLITA is fiction? a lot of writers make the mistake of setting out to write "fiction," not to write what they know. they think fiction is inherently something alien to them. unless you're willing to do a lot of research to make what is alien become natural or known, then you should not write... you should not write at all. ever. or maybe you should write, so others will recognize, for example, how badly you (as a 25-year-old white american male) have portrayed three pubescent girls in thailand during the rainy season and thusly thrash you for it.
details are important to all genres of writing. no details, no winning argument. no details, no convincing historical piece. no details, no groundbreaking research. no details; no explosive, conscience-rending poetry. no details, no meat to your short story.
back to fiction. this kind of writing is always already straying from its definition because detail is not fiction. the look on your protagonist's face when they become disappointed--writer, you took that from your father. that line about the frozen chicken, it came from a stranger in the restaurant you ate dinner at last week.
even most pieces not set in reality remain loaded with fact. what does a non-earth-originating life form look like? they're all either based on earth-originating life forms or are based on the opposite of those. humans, as writers, can apparently only manipulate the known in an attempt to define the unknown. even our creation stories feature humanoids and animal-like creatures--if the culture is particularly creative, sometimes they combine the two. we can only handle so much alteration of how we perceive reality--which is always a flawed perception, anyway. for example, all of the fantasy creatures you can think of are based on something that exists here on earth, something that can be sensed. getting outside of reality all together is too much for our imaginations.
...
the point of this, i think, is that i am a bad fiction writer because i am too analytical to even begin being imaginative. internet, witness my writer's achilles' heel!
also, witness my excellent use of apostrophe--both kinds, even!