Stephen Dixon's protagonist Meyer, in the middle of a writing funk, thinks he's hit upon an idea for a story:
A boy. Something about a boy. And a bookstore. Got it, he thinks, and starts typing: "A boy in a huge bookstore was signing copies of a book of short-shorts and prose poems he'd written. He looked to be around twelve or thirteen. He was sitting behind a table stacked with copies of his book and more were in opened cartons on the floor. There were fifty or so people, all of them adults, waiting on line with copies of his book. Al, who'd had a few stories and poems in literary magazines the last twenty years but never a book published, walked up to the table and took a book. 'If you want that signed,' someone said, 'you have to get to the end of the line.' 'I just want to look at it; I don't want to buy it,' Al said. It was published by a major publisher. The jacket copy began with 'A youthful masterpiece, unlike anything ever written.' There were blurbs in back by well-known serious writers. One called the kid 'The real thing, besides being a literary phenom. The future of American literature is assured.'" Enough, he thinks, this is going nowhere, and he takes the two sheets out of the typewriter, tears them up with the poem he tried writing before, drops the pieces into the trashbasket under the table, and re-covers the typewriter.
