Read the text and fill in the gaps with the correct options.

A hard task
I barely made the 8:30 a.m. Saturday train to Huntington, a town on the north shore of Long Island. The railroad stopped service because of the snowfall the night before; sleepy commuters wearing smart suits crowded in the train. They seemed really tired and eager to get home and finally ... the rest of the weekend with their families.
I had planned on using this one-hour train ride to get a good start on a short story I was ... to submit to a magazine on Monday morning. But standing there, sandwiched between a stroller and an exhausted businessman, I couldn’t even get my journal out of my backpack. It was absolutely impossible to compose my thoughts on its pages. Of course, it was a ... for me as I was forced to relax instead of struggling with my blank journal pages. Frankly ... , I’d been struggling to come up with an idea for the story for days, my thoughts circling aimlessly in the warehouse of my mind. The harder I ... for the idea, the emptier my head seemed. And then, unexpectedly, as I was trying hard to maintain my balance, pressed against the bathroom door and a crowd of commuters, I finally got an idea –– or rather, an idea for how to get an idea.
I decided that by the end of ... adventure I have this weekend, I will write a short story about it. I told my friend Bennett about my decision when I was getting inside his car at the station. And the two of us set ... on our adventure.