Gigi opened up the first exercise. Hmmm… why the butterflies? She’d written so many scenes before, but still this self-doubt rose up to close her throat. Did other aspirant writers feel this too? Or was it only her? Would she ever really be able to crack it as a writer? Was she a fraud? Maybe she was delusional and there was no real talent to cultivate. She couldn’t feel any new ideas brewing. No stories desperately wanting to be told. Perhaps she should scrap this and try her hand at baking.

But she couldn’t. The prompt teased her. It led her on. Even if she was no Jane Austen, she could still dabble. The urge to write over-rode her monkey mind. So what if no-one else thought it was great? She loved doing it. The words came, slowly at first and then in a tsunami. The prompt gave her the push she needed. New prompts would appear every day now and there was no way of knowing what they’d be. A bubble of excitement tickled her chest. Yes. She’d just keep going until something took. Surely if she kept practising, she’d get to be good? A picture of a tortoise overtaking a hare flashed across her mind’s eye.

Could she manage to tame the cute detector this time? Would she be able to conjure up something new every day? What if her imagination got squashed under marking chores and domestic duties? Had she really overcome that writer’s block thing? Maybe she wasn’t really a writer after all…But she wanted to be one. She had to do it.

If she worked out at the gym every day for a month, she’d be pretty fit. Her body would start taking shape and she’d be on the way to a bikini summer…well maybe next summer anyway. So the same could apply to her writing skills? If she slogged away, every day, eventually her brain would create new pathways and she’d soon be writing acceptable scenes, then good ones and finally people would be cheering and calling her the latest literary wonder. She’d be published and interviewed and even appear on the late night news. She’d…

Perhaps she should just stick with the first exercise for starters. One small step for Gigi, one giant step for the dormant author inside her.