A Story of Two Writers (from Fafoo’s Twitter)
In a certain town, there lived a man and a woman, both writers. The two of them were similar age, and even had similar writing styles, but there was a major difference in their sales, and the woman perceived the man, who put out one best-seller after another, with hostility. One day, reading a feature about the man, a statement caught her eye: "Loneliness is the driving power behind my stories."
The woman had a thought. If his loneliness were taken away, would he be unable to write anymore? She put that idea into practice. Concealing her identity, she approached the man, and played the part of the convenient heroine of a romance novel. Clueless, the man gradually opened his heart to her, and at some point, he'd completely fallen in love.
After three months had passed, the man could no longer write anything. The plan was a triumphant success. But the woman couldn't feel satisfied. In fact, she was wracked with guilt and couldn't sleep. To encourage the man, she wrote countless long, anonymous fan letters. In doing so, she finally realized. Ahh, so I was a fan of his.
Wanting the writer she so admired to take up the pen once more, the woman told him, though it broke her heart: "I approached you pretending to like you just so I could take away your motivation for writing. In reality, I've hated being with you. I've achieved my objective well enough, so now I'm going to leave you."
The man was deeply wounded. Having regained his drive of loneliness, he repeatedly released even more excellent books than before his slump. The woman watched over him from the shadows. The two lived out their lives alone, and died alone. In an interview toward the end of her life, the woman left this comment: "Love is the driving power behind my stories."
The end. Spurred on by an increase in stories with writers as protagonists, I wrote this thinking like "if it were me, I'd make it something like this." Back to work.