Fragments of a Screenplay

The cursor blinked on the blank screen, a silent metronome ticking away at my patience. I leaned back in my chair, arms crossed over my chest, eyes fixed on the mockery of that white void. Every writer's battle. Every storyteller's personal hell. The vast nothingness that demanded to be filled with something profound, something worthy. 

I had a title. Expansion. Just a single word, but it pulsed in my mind like an unsolved puzzle. It could mean anything. The expansion of the universe, of knowledge, of power, of destruction. It could be about a city spreading like veins across a dying earth or the quiet expansion of a human soul stretching beyond its own limits. I liked the ambiguity. I hated the pressure. 

I drummed my fingers against the desk, thinking about characters. Every great screenplay starts with them. Living, breathing people who exist first in the mind and then on the page. They have to be real. I closed my eyes, letting images swirl in the blackness behind my eyelids. 

A boy—seventeen, maybe eighteen. He has a sharp jawline, unkempt hair that curls at the ends, and eyes that flicker between defiance and doubt. He’s smart, but not in the way that gets straight A’s. More in the way that questions everything and refuses to accept easy answers. Maybe he’s the protagonist. Maybe he’s me, just bent into a different shape. 

He needs a name. Names are important. They carry weight, history, an unspoken promise of who someone might become. Eli. Yes, Eli. Short, simple, but with a weight that could belong to someone who matters. 

Eli stands at the edge of a city, the skyline a jagged silhouette against a sky smudged with dying sunlight. He’s on the brink of something—change, escape, destruction? He doesn’t know yet. Neither do I. But that’s the thrill of writing, isn’t it? The unraveling of something unknown even to the creator. 

But he can’t exist alone. No one does. 

A girl—contrast is key. Where Eli is rough edges and restless energy, she’s precision, control. Nina. She speaks with a kind of deliberate grace, each word chosen like a chess move. Maybe she’s a painter. Or a pianist. Someone whose hands shape the world in ways Eli can’t quite grasp. 

The dynamic starts to form. Eli wants out of this city; Nina thrives in it. He’s fire, unpredictable and hungry. She’s ice, slow-moving but unyielding. They don’t belong together, but the best stories are built on friction, on the inevitable collision of two forces that should never have crossed paths.

I start to type, letting their world breathe, letting them speak in voices that aren’t mine but somehow are. The city becomes real—a place of towering skyscrapers and underground tunnels, a place where the rich look down from glass fortresses while the rest claw at the underbelly. Maybe it’s a dystopia. Or maybe it’s just a heightened version of the world we already live in. 

The plot begins to take shape. Eli discovers something—an artifact, a secret, a buried truth that threatens to shift everything he knows. Expansion. The word circles back. Maybe it’s about expanding the mind, breaking through the boundaries of perception. Maybe Nina is part of it, part of the system he wants to dismantle. Or maybe she’s the only one who understands what’s at stake. 

The more I write, the more I realize this isn’t just a screenplay. It’s a mirror. A reflection of my own questions, my own longing to push beyond the edges of what’s safe and known. 

The blank screen isn’t blank anymore. And that’s the first victory. 

As I type, the words begin to flicker. Not on the screen, but in my mind. The cityscape I’ve imagined is shifting, bending in on itself like a dream unraveling. I shake my head, blink a few times, but the sensation doesn’t go away. Eli isn’t just standing at the edge of the city anymore—he’s turning to look at me. 

It’s not real. I know that. But the longer I stare at the screen, the more the words seem to breathe. A strange pressure builds behind my eyes. My fingers hover over the keyboard, hesitant now. I try to type another sentence, but the letters scramble on their own, rearranging, reshaping, spelling out something I didn’t write. 

Who is writing who? 

My breath catches in my throat. The air in the room feels heavier. The walls are closer. I glance at the door, half-expecting something—or someone—to be standing there. But it’s just my empty apartment. Just me and my laptop and a story that suddenly feels too alive. 

I push away from the desk, my pulse quickening. The screen flickers again. The words blur, and then for just a second, I swear I see my reflection on the screen—but it isn’t quite right. My face, but different. The eyes are too sharp. The expression is unreadable. And then it’s gone. 

Eli’s world isn’t just expanding. It’s bleeding into mine. 

To be continued… 

-Anand Gopal Mondhe