Contributed by Andrew Cheverton on 12/11/08

I dislike fireworks – for any number of reasons – and the idea of writing a story about them fills me with a sort of melancholic despair. This fugue of intent has left me without any sort of inspiration, which has accelerated as the deadline draws closer; and this, this escalation of expectation, has coalesced into a form of writer’s block, a simple lack of words that itself creates a form of depression, feeding into (and, even more maddeningly, from) the initial fugue until I am at the centre of a maelstrom of nothingness that simply gets stronger with every second it exists.

The sight of a crowd of people, all stood in the cold and the dark and staring up into the heavens, watching the pretty lights, makes me sad. I appreciate that firework displays are spectacular and feats of some technique and flair, but I am left (during and after the event) feeling like the spent cardboard tubes that litter the ground the morning after. Unlike other forms of entertainment, the fireworks display seems to me to be utterly ephemeral, so that one is very much like the other, and even the best display can only be remembered in vague terms. They are the epitome of anticlimactic activity.

I tried on numerous occasions to work up some idea that took a metaphorical approach to the picture; I saw the spent firework as representing a man, sated of his lusts, and spread, semi-conscious, on a bed; I saw another man, a recent father, sending up a ready-made display of fireworks to celebrate the birth of his child (one firework failed to ignite and he threw it into the night air by hand – as it faded from his view, somewhere along the same line of sight another firework exploded into colour); but these ideas and others were torn into the winds by ennui and the stories of these and other people were lost to me. The ideas were there, but the words were not. They burnt and were gone, leaving only darkness and a lazy shifting haze of amorphous smoke that I could not grip.

The idea of a single picture to inspire many different stories by various hands is a good one, with an infinite amount of possibilities. This week, the outcome was to hit a particular nerve, and bore in me a form of creative depression. The block was too solid to break through, and there was no way to manoeuvre around it. My attitude to fireworks leached itself into every word I tried to write.

Somehow, the powder in me had burnt out and there was nothing else to do but fall, in darkness, to the ground.