Ellen is sitting in the dining room trying to figure out an idea for her new story. She tears up whatever she is working on and, while getting up from her seat, throws it into the nearby waste bin in irritation. She then paces across the room before stopping abruptly. She turns back towards the bin and approaches it with a curious expression. Fishing out a balled up sheet of paper, she returns to her seat and reviews the sheet. Resigned, she goes to rewrite the discarded idea, but it appears that her pencil is not functioning. Now enraged, she tosses both pencil and paper to the ground and storms off.
