The Worm In My Brain

Posted by Lisa Slomin

June 14, 2025

I don’t always know when a story is coming. But when it does, I feel it like a flicker, just enough to break through whatever else I’m doing. Sometimes it hits while I’m driving, and I have to pull over, heart pounding, scrambling for a pen or my phone to get it down before it dissolves. Other times it comes in the shower, or at 2:47 a.m. with no warning. And if I don't catch it in those moments? It’s gone. Not always forever, but far enough out of reach that what it was is no longer what it could have been.

I forget more ideas than I remember. That's the truth. But the ones that stay, the ones that gnaw at me, whispering and pulsing, they don’t let go. They become the worm in my brain. I can't do anything else until I sit down and get it out. I mean all of it. A whole chapter. A whole story. If I try to chip away at it in parts, it loses its shape, its urgency. For me, writing is often an all-or-nothing act.

There’s no ritual. No perfect time of day. It’s chaos and obsession and compulsion. It's messy. Sometimes inconvenient. But when it lands, when I actually catch the idea and write it through, there's nothing else like it. It's like exorcism and magic and therapy all at once.

I write fast because if I don’t, the story outpaces me. I don’t outline. I follow the thing until it ends. Then I go back and figure out what I did. I can revise. I can refine. But that first flood? That has to come in a single sitting or it doesn’t come at all.

And I’ve made peace with that. Or maybe not peace. But a kind of pact.