Disillusioned with his life, job, and a dreary commute, a middle-aged man begins to wonder what happened to his childhood dreams and where it all went wrong. He begins having imaginary conversations with himself age seven, fourteen, and twenty-one to find out why. Resolving to put things right and become the writer he once aspired to be, he becomes stuck. He goes through displacement activities to avoid writing, then has a breakthrough lifting the curse of the blank page. Deliberately writing badly, he then breaks all the rules of writing just to write something. With all this out of his system, he settles down to begin a 'proper' short story. As his first efforts falter, he starts using creative writing techniques to get going, but then things take an unexpected turn. Characters unrelated to his stories turn up of their own accord in the real world and the boundary between fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurred. He has an idea for a full-length novel and is making good progress until an earlier character comes along to steal the manuscript at gunpoint on the grounds that it isn't very good. He starts a new piece, but with the blurring of reality it is not clear if he is writing about himself or it is a new story. Finding himself in 1911, with all of his modern day possessions turned into their period equivalents, he goes in search of H.G. Wells to get advice.