Would an author dare to take a voodoo potion to overcome writer's block?
By Leu Seyer – Sept. 12th, 2025
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Dayan (1995), Nwokocha (2023), Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert (2017) had noted that Creole spiritual traditions had exerted a ‘profound and pervasive creative influence’ on Latin music, art, and language.
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Before Leu Seyer gained his bloom and the necessary insights to craft lengthy stories (like “My Buddy Bali”), he grappled with the challenge of weaving his fresh ideas. He struggled with spinning words that couldn’t be woven together into a cohesive, gripping novel. His mind was a tumultuous sea, teeming with fragments of inspiration that ebbed and flowed. Yet none seemed to coalesce into a satisfying narrative. Yet, its transformation, rather than being gradual, was spontaneously explosive, ending in his disappearance.
The beginning of the ending started with a vanishing act. Thus, the Leu Seyer’s literary agent and all the others to whom he owed any money tried to break the windows of the room he was renting at the time. However, the landlord stated that they would have to pay for the replacements. Then they called a locksmith to open the door lock, but Leu had apparently installed a blocker embedded in the floor and ceiling to prevent it from opening with him inside. So, there were only two options: to break a window or to break the door into pieces to get access to the room.
Considering that replacing a window is cheaper than replacing a door, the group opted for the first option. Blackout curtains concealed the interior of the room. Without further ado and without hesitation, the literary agent, Ms. Lyons, wrapped a hammer in a towel and struck the glass. The unmistakable clink of glass shards falling to the floor echoed in the ears of everyone present. But now, as the agent attempted to enter the room, she found that Leu had installed a kind of metal grate securely embedded in the cement frame, a safeguard against late-night trespassers who might take advantage of this weak point. There was no other option but to break the door with the axe they had just purchased from a hardware store nearby. There was no more waiting; the group's patience had evaporated entirely.
Once inside, the incredibly deafening silence greeted them like the quiet of a predator on a tawny mound: no tipped chair, no half-packed suitcase, no evidence of a man fleeing or a suicide note. There was nothing unusual on the floor either. The sheets on the bed were decently covering the mattress (without any prominent wrinkles), as if Leu had merely slid through them and disappeared into thin air. Only the monotonous hum of the cooling fan of an old laptop open on the desk and its line of unresolved text offered the only physical evidence that a living being had been there:
“The promising writer, Leu Seyer, had always struggled with the writer’s block…”
That single line pulsed on the screen like a heartbeat. But Leu himself was gone. His wallet remained on the nightstand, stuffed with cash and his driver’s license: his watch, his shoes, his sports jacket—all still there. The closet smelled faintly of cedar, with a bergamot and lavender scent of cologne. Not even his electric toothbrush was missing. It was as though he had walked out without his body.
The landlord stepped cautiously into the room after all the others came out. He had rented this space for years, and tenants often left quietly in the night to dodge rent. But this was different, Leu had paid a year in advance. Yet, this room radiated a hollow pressure, as if the walls themselves had absorbed some terrible secret. Another strange odor lingered in the corner near the desk—a unique, crisp scent from brand-new books standing on the bookshelf, and the faint tang of rain-soaked ink from the printer. The landlord crossed himself, muttered a prayer under his breath, (something’s fishy here—he thought) and backed away. Nothing to worry about, he could leave the room locked for a year; it was already paid for.
Soon, the mystery started to unfold. The disappearance of Leu Seyer became breaking news faster than wildfire. After all, by now, he wasn't just any common tenant. He was indeed one of the rising stars of the flourishing Caribbean Neorealism movement. In just a couple of years, he went from obscurity to public recognition in the mainstream like the New York Times, The Guardian, and several literary podcasts. Aspiring writers applauded him as a visionary. Publishers courted him, conscious of his potential.
And now—gone. No note. No flight tickets. No bank withdrawals. His sudden silence was louder than any scandal.
Speculation bloomed. Some fans claimed it was a stunt, that his next novel would reveal the “truth” of his vanishing. Others muttered about exhaustion, paranoia, and drugs. A few—always whispered—spoke of something more supernatural. On forums, anonymous posts appeared: “The stories themselves took him.” “I’d heard the whispers, too” (a rising writer named Norman wrote in a blog post.)
The rumors about the ancient “Haitian Whispers’ Potion of Unwritten Stories” came alive. Some prominent writers said that those whispers were not metaphors; they were real. They were lingering in the thin space between imagination and reality. They were the disappeared ideas and voices of lost generations—the unpublished novels almost finished before a fatal accident or half-started and abandoned in drawers, the forgotten drafts eaten by hard-drive crashes, the poems never set down on paper. Such stories did not die, they trespassed the world of the living with their spirits. They fermented. They drifted through time like invisible parasites, waiting for someone desperate enough to give them voice.
Most writers hear them only faintly, in the half-dreams before sleep, or when staring at a blank page. Most shake them off. But Leu Seyer was different. He had invited them in. Every sip of the potion he took had opened him further, turning him into a beacon for those restless shadows.
At first, the spirits offered generosity: sparks of brilliance, flashes of dialogue, sudden twists that seemed divinely inspired. The completion of a couple of lengthy books in one year. But in reality, nothing is ever free. Leu would find out by the end of the year. He had not merely collaborated with them; he had stolen some plots from them—plucking entire chapters from the ether and claiming them as his own. And the spirits, like all celestial beings, do demand payments.
Those two literary gems of Leu Seyer came from the “Library of the Unwritten Stories, a legacy of the spirits. A month after swallowing the potion the previous year (one couldn’t say he drank it because of its horrible taste), Leu stumbled backward. His pulse hammered in his chest. He tried to cry out, but when he opened his mouth, no sound came. Instead, black ink spilled from his lips, streaming down his chin and pooling at his feet. His very breath looked like a transcription of some unfinished book. Now, a year later, in limbo, he seemed to be paying his debt not to the living but to the spirits.
Meanwhile, in the world above his non-being state, the laptop in his rented room kept humming. For days, then weeks, yet the glowing line of text never changed:
“The ambitious Leu Seyer had always struggled with writer’s block…”
Then, one night, a new line appeared beneath it:
“The ambitious Leu Seyer, who had always struggled with writer’s block, now will never be without a story.”
The landlord swore he heard keys clicking from behind the locked door every night. Others who later entered the room among family and friends concerned about his whereabouts, claimed the air buzzed faintly, as though whispering. No one could prove it. Yet online, rumors multiplied: that a manuscript was still growing inside the laptop, page by page, written by unseen hands.
Uncle Enrique said that after staring at the glow of the screen long enough, he could even hear the whispers. Not in complete pieces at first, but in fragments, some dialogues, orphaned scenes, pieces with neither beginnings nor ends--a dangerous temptation for any writer who was already starving for ideas.
Before his disappearance, just a week after taking the voodoo potion, Leu did not seem to have improved his writing. He even called his agent to negotiate an extension with the publishing company. The agent almost laughed—no, he did, because they were already late for an extension given. Leu started to question himself. “Have I really sold my brand-new car, borrowed money, and risked everything for a bottle of dyed rum and snake oil?” Forcing his vision to the top as needed to work under the light of candles given the uninterrupted blackouts in Haiti. He stared at his laptop screen, the cursor blinking like a taunt. The room smelled of mildew and kerosene, the candlelight flickering against cracked walls.
Two weeks later, as he was coming back from Pistachio Cafe Bistro, he heard it… a whisper. It was so faint at first that he thought it was the rustling of the trees and bushes… but once in his room, he heard clearly… "L E U S E Y E R... We finally have found you!
He spun around. The room was empty. It could be that someone came in and left a hidden recording device—he thought. Paranoia took hold of him, and the next day, he ordered security window bar grilles for the glass window that opened directly onto the street. Additionally, he paid for the installation of security bolts for the door, which were fixed to both the floor and ceiling. Later that night, at his monthly literary Zoom meeting, he told the group about what had happened, but no one believed him.
The very next day, the whisper called to him, now in a softer tone, like paper crumpling in the distance. Another voice joined the first, deeper and more melodic, and began to open up inside him, pouring out words of language woven through him as if each utterance were a piece to be woven with vibrant filaments. His sure hand moved over the keys. A few phrases emerged from between his fingers. Then a few more. Somehow, he managed to transcribed the whispers.
“The potion is working! But for how long?”—he thought. Thus, maybe buying another bottle – against the Voodoo priest advice. It is important to emphasize that voodoo is a religion in Haiti. (Brown, 1991).
For Leu, in this new stage of his life, reality seemed to have blurred into nights. He was barely eating the minimum to survive and slept a lot less than needed. He wrote feverishly, his candle burning down to wax puddles during the prolonged power outages—entire chapters formed in a single sitting. Characters arrived fully fleshed, demanding to speak. Entire landscapes unfolded before him—cities he had never seen, dialects he had never studied, became familiar and easy to translate, the histories he could not have invented alone.
When exhaustion claimed him, the whispers carried on, reciting stories like lullabies in the dark. He would wake with new ideas to complete the plots already pulsing in his head, rushing back to the laptop to release them before they dissolved back into thin air.
By the end of six months, a complete novel of more than one hundred thousand words lay before him, all coherent—an epic fantasy laced with wit, philosophy, and heart. His prose shimmered with life. Critics later called it “visionary, surreal, otherworldly.”
Within months, he was a darling of literary circles. But, unable so socialized as the whispers in his room (in reality in his head), kept him working nonstop on his next novel. His reviews appeared in magazines, journals, and scholars started to notice him. Audiences hailed him as a genius, a prodigy who had come from nowhere to redefine storytelling.
Leu Seyer, once a desperate young man staring at a blinking cursor, was now untouchable.
Or so it seemed.
By the completion of his second fiction book that year, the voices shifted. What had begun subtly started to take another tone. While still editing his second book, he noticed the whispers growing louder. Where once they had murmured—suggesting dialogue, hinting at turns—they now barked. New voices of impatient spirits (perhaps those who just passed away shortly before finishing their novels with all the ideas still fresh in their memories). On the one hand, a subtle voice: "Leu Seyer, tell my story! You still owe me." On the other hand, a demanding voice: "No, mine! You have to fulfill your contract!"
The voices overlapped, arguing, their tones sharpened with demands. He tried to block them out, but when he closed his eyes, faces appeared in the words on his screen—hollow-eyed, mouths open in silent cries. The potion, it seemed, had not only unlocked creativity. It had opened the door wider, and now the flood appeared hard to contain.
At the beginning, when working on his first assisted novel, Leu felt that exhaustion was to blame. Now he was able to grasp reality better as some voices grew sharper—mocking threats of his failures, hissing whenever he deleted a line: “Every word is ours. You have no right,” one spirit said. He fled, but the further he went, the louder they seemed to be. He thought of a psychiatrist, but as it dawned upon him that he would have to disclose his situation—his rising fame, his adoring readers, his newfound stability—he convinced himself that it was not an option.
Sailing at full speed, he finished the second book that year—a complete publishing success. Then came the night of the distortion. Leu sat hunched over his laptop, editing what was to be his third novel, when the words on the screen blurred. He rubbed his eyes. The text twisted, rearranging itself into symbols he didn’t recognize. Then the letters stretched, bent, re-formed into faces—gaunt, screaming, pushing outward as though trying to break through the glass of the screen.
Leu shoved his chair back, heart hammering. The faces flickered, hollow mouths widening. A scream lodged in his throat, but what escaped was not sound—only a wet cough of black ink staining the printings of what he was reproducing at the time.
He stumbled forward, desperate to close the laptop, but the keys clicked beneath unseen fingers, lines appearing faster than he could blink. Then he decided to grab the second vial—3/4-filled with glowing liquid—a massive overflow should then bring calm when the dam bursts. Yes, he managed to get the second bottle and had only taken the first two sips. However, he tripped and the liquid seeped into the floorboards, spreading like ink spilled on parchment. This careless handling of the potion altered the molecules of nearby objects. It opened a postern gate to another reality—a path shaped by the desires of the spirits influencing the chemistry of the elements in the real world. A phenomenon spilling into his contaminated body, almost intoxicated with this elixir. He should never have consumed more than one dose.
The voices fell silent for an instant. The silence was worse.
Then came a final whisper, colder than he had ever experienced before:
"You never listened, Leu... Now, you are ours."
Before his ethereal disappearance, Leu was suddenly struck by the memories of how he had ended up there in a rented room in Port-au-Prince, Haiti—a tip he got from a fellow writer from New Orleans.
After arriving at Toussaint Louverture International Airport (PAP) in search of a solution to his creative block, he immediately rented a tap-tap to get to his first destination. As soon as the sun fell, neon gave way to candlelight. Alleys glowed with kerosene, and voices dropped to whispers. Leu Seyer drifted through them, chasing an address that felt like a riddle: a bar with no name, a single bulb, a courtyard door.
Hours later, he found it. The courtyard smelled of rum, sage, and sweat. A lone bulb flickered above a crooked frame. Inside, shadows clung to rafters. In the corner, a man in white linen and coral beads watched him with unblinking eyes.
“Priest?” Leu asked, the word slipping loose.
“Yes,” came the rough reply. “Sit.”
Leu laid a pouch of bills on the table. “I know what I’ve come for. I’m prepared to pay.”
The priest smiled thinly. “Money buys rum. Spirits deal in sacrifices. What do you seek?”
“My real potential. To stop being… less.” Leu replied.
“The truth,” the priest said, “…is a knife. Are you ready to bleed?”
Leu didn’t say anything; he just nodded.
The priest took the pouch of money. “Not enough. You must give yourself.”
He gestured, and a tall man in a wide-brimmed hat stepped from the shadows.
“This is Jacmel. He’ll take you to the mountain. What happens after—is up to you.”
Leu hesitated… “The potion?”
“If you are worthy, she gives it. If not… she’ll take.”
Jaw tight, Leu followed Jacmel into the streets in the middle of the dark night.
He was ready to enter the edge of the unknown. At dawn, the city softened: vendors shouting fried plantains, buses honking prayers, murals of spirits watching with cracked eyes. The streets thinned to dirt trails toward the mountains. At a small cemetery, Jacmel stopped.
“This is where I leave you. Follow north to the river. Red cloths will guide you.” Jacmel walked away, and Leu stepped into the jungle alone.
The trees fractured moonlight into stripes of light and dark. In the jungle trail. Insects screamed, unseen things shifted. The air reeked of wet earth and sweetness. At the river, stones broke the current in a crooked line. He crossed, slipping once, heart racing, boots soaked. On the far bank, red cloths fluttered faintly.
Hours deeper, thirst burned, and his body sagged. He leaned against a tree.
An old woman appeared, stooped in front of him, draped in cloth, herbs spilling perfume from her satchel.
“Ou pedi, Blanc,” she said… “Am I lost,” Leu questioned himself.
“Madame Mambo?” Leu asked.
She only turned and beckoned.
The hut was marked with white chalk. Smoke curled from the firepit, and herbs hung like coded shadows. Inside: jars, bones, glowing bottles. The air pressed heavily.
“You seek the Whispers’ Potion,” she softly insinuated.
“Yes.” His voice cracked.
“It is knowledge. A door. Doors require payment.” She added.
“I’ll pay.” Leu had come prepared for the mundane musts of this world.
Her smile cut thin. “We shall see.”
She lifted a vial glowing with blue firelight. “The before is not that hard. The afterward is.”
She asked for his right hand, and Leu presented to her. Then, she graved a knife and did a cut on his hand. Immediately she poured the drops of his blood into the potion and smile hard heartedly. Following the mixing, she passes the potion to Leu.
Leu swallowed in dry and asked, “Side effects?”
This time her laugh rippled the shadows… “Every story has a price. Some costs are collected later in life.”
“What do I offer?” he whispered.
“Your certainty. Your permission to be rewritten. Refuse, and something will be taken.”
The words sank deep. He nodded. He had no other choice.
The way back to the city was easier. Leu couldn’t wait for the first sip. That night, in his rented room, the vial sat beside his laptop. A fan ticked, the mosquito coil glowed. He uncorked the bottle. The scent rose: rain-soaked pages, ink, a storm waiting. Cool metal touched his tongue. He thought the effects would be immediately apparent (but nobody had said that). Minutes passed. Nothing.
The whisper was searching for his soul at first. Then, in their time, they arrived timidly, between silence and sounds. When he finally managed to decipher the words, his fingers touched the keys. Words poured out, unstoppable, trembling from his hands.
Nonetheless, the worst thing about all of us is despair. Leu was not immune to this human condition. Before he was celebrated, before he was whispered about, before his name filled literary journals and podcasts, Leu Seyer was only a young man staring at a blank screen. The cursor blinked at him with cruel patience.
At first, he told himself it was temporary. Writer’s block was standard; every author endured it. He tried the usual remedies: writing prompts, fragments stolen from other authors or even the Bible, and rephrased. He scoured Quora threads, Reddit forums, and blogs that promised hacks to “unblock creativity in ten minutes.” But nothing worked.
The more he failed, the more desperate he grew. So, when he hears the rumors of the “Haitian Whispers’ Potion”—not in print but in hushed margins—he was ready to believe. He laughed at first, yet the idea took root. Could there really be a cure for writer’s block? He asked himself that question night after night, staring at his blank screen.
So, his obsession grew. The search consumed him. He scoured late-night forums from New Orleans, chased false leads, and sent emails to strangers who never replied. He heard gossip about a man who had traveled to Haiti and returned transformed—less brilliant, somehow broken. But he never found proof of it. Still, he couldn’t let the dream go away. The very impossibility of it only made him hungrier.
If there was even a chance, wasn’t it worth trying? That is what he thought, and it was the last straw. He booked the cheapest hotel he found in the southeastern part of Louisiana.
Leu knew he had to make sacrifices. Thus, to chase that dream, Leu began to sell pieces of his life. He borrowed money from family and friends. He sold his brand-new Honda Accord for far less than it was worth (just a little). He took out a loan from the county credit union where he was working at. He even applied for a new credit card and drained it before the ink on his signature was dry.
Every dollar, every borrowed cent, went toward a single purpose: the trip to get the potion.
The spending was reckless, but he silenced the guilt with visions of success. If this worked, if he returned with stories flowing through him like rivers, it would all be justified. The debt, the lies, the sacrifices—none of it would matter. Then as if by chance, he got an address in Port Prince, Haiti that promised to lead him to the potion.
The night before he left for Haiti, Leu could barely sleep. His thoughts galloped ahead, racing into futures he had not yet earned. He saw his name on book covers, imagined awards, interviews, and admiration. He pictured himself as a knight of words, a modern Quixote tilting at the windmills of silence, and winning.
When morning came, he packed with trembling hands. His bags bulged with notebooks and pens, as though the act of carrying them might guarantee their use. The Uber ride to the airport felt surreal. Streetlights blurred past as he rehearsed the story he would one day tell: how he had risked everything, how he had sought the mythical potion, how it had made him a successful writer—or maybe I should come out with another story—he suddenly thought.
The flight took three and a half hours, yet to him it felt like minutes. He stared out the window at the shifting clouds, heart pounding, imagination soaring. He was already writing the triumph in his mind.
The plane descended onto the cracked pavement of Toussaint Louverture International Airport. As Leu stepped into the Haitian air, a different weight pressed against his chest. The air smelled of salt, earth, and something older—an ancient breath riding the wind. Golden light stretched across the tarmac, shadows long and strange. Customs passed without issue, but the strangeness did not fade.
Once out of the airport, the city pulsed with sound and color. Hawkers shouted in Creole, drums throbbed from side streets, and murals of loa spirits stared from crumbling walls. The smell of griot pork tangled with diesel fumes and rum. Tap-tap buses honked their painted prayers; each side scrawled with saints and slogans. A young pickpocket tries stealing his cellphone, but Leu had the New York City alertness on all the time.
Leu walked the streets and felt eyes on him—curious, assessing, sometimes unwelcoming. He wondered if they saw his desperation. The deeper he went, the more the city shifted. Modern avenues gave way to narrow streets where candles glowed in shop windows and murals of Papa Legba loomed, hat brim shading knowing eyes. Candles flickered beside powders, charms, bottles of Kleren rum. Conversations lowered as he passed. Everywhere he went, he caught fragments of gossip—always the same word, circling like a moth: potion.
That was his first step into the end of his career. He had not yet met the priest. He had not yet entered the jungle. He had not yet drunk from the glowing vial. But already, the path had closed behind him.
Still, months after his disappearance, long after the rumors of the “Library of the Unwritten Books” had passed into legend, a strange report emerged. On a deserted stretch of coast in northern Haiti, a Dutch tourist wandering beyond the usual paths stumbled upon a man staggering in the sand. His clothes were ragged, his body thin as parchment, his lips cracked with thirst. He walked in small, feverish circles as if bound to an invisible axis, murmuring fragments of unfinished stories.
It was Leu Seyer, the famous author of “The Accidentally International Incident of Mr. Flumple.”
Barely alive, sunburned and delirious, he collapsed into the arms of his rescuer, who carried him back to the city and later to the lodge where the owner and locals crowded around in awe. He had returned from nowhere, inexplicably dragged back into the world of the living. Yet something was missing. His right hand—his writing hand—was gone, the stump crudely sealed by a scar that looked older than the time he had been away.
Notwithstanding, in Haiti, a legendary priest said that it was his price. The spirits of the unwritten stories had released his body, but they had taken their due. Inspiration would no longer flow from his pen; he could only speak in fragments now, broken lines that dissolved before they reached completion. “With rest and therapy…” specialists said he could return to functioning normally in society.
Some said the spirits had shown mercy, allowing him to live. Others believed he had been expelled for failing to finish their endless books. All in all, Leu Seyer never explained. He only whispered to those who leaned close enough:
"The spirits of the unwritten stories are still in hunting season."
On a side note:
As unbelievable as it may seem, rumors persist that miracles still happen. Leu's young wife came to rescue him—or did she come so she could transfer his accounts to her name?
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REFERENCES
Brown, K. M. (1991). Mama Lola: A Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. University of California Press.
Fernández Olmos, M., & Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2017). Creole religions of the Caribbean: An introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo (3rd ed.). New York University Press.
Dayan, J. (1995). Haiti, history, and the gods. University of California Press. (Reprinted 2008 by University of California Press.)
Nwokocha, E. A. (2023). Vodou en vogue: Fashioning black divinities in Haiti and the United States. University of North Carolina Press.
