By the Book (Meant to Be #2)(31)
Izzy took a breath and stayed where she was. “Beau.”
He glared at her. “What?”
She looked straight at him. “Why don’t we start over?”
He stared at her for a second, swallowed, and then sat back down. “Okay. Sorry. I’m just…on edge about this, that’s all.”
Izzy grinned at him. “Oh really? I couldn’t tell.”
He laughed, thank God. If he hadn’t—if he’d taken offense to that, too—she’d be certain this partnership of theirs was doomed from the outset.
“I guess you’re used to stress cases, dealing with writers all day,” he said. “Or hotheads, as the case may be—I have no business calling myself a writer.”
When he said that, he just looked sad instead of angry. Okay, now was the time for her best pep talk skills to come out.
“First of all,” she said, “I am something of a hothead myself occasionally, I don’t know if you’ve noticed that?” He laughed again. “Second: If you write, then you’re a writer. You don’t have to have written a book or even feel good about your writing to get that title. And you have been writing—you told me so. All that work you’ve already done? None of it was wasted. It’s all building blocks; even if you can’t see them, they’re there. It will all inform the work you’ll go on to do.”
Now that she knew he’d been listening to her, that he was actually paying attention to her advice, talking to him about writing came easier. And maybe now it was easier because her heart was actually in it. She really cared if she helped him.
“Also,” she continued, “lots of writers are just anxious as hell. Everyone deletes stuff in a panic sometimes. How about next time you feel like deleting something, just open a new document. Call it Deleted Scenes, or The Bad Words, or Stuff I Cut, or whatever, and cut and paste it over there. Hide it in a different folder, if you need to, so you don’t have to see it. Email it to a friend, get them to promise not to read it, whatever. Just save it somehow.”
He swallowed hard. “Okay,” he said. “That’s…that’s a good idea.”
She took a handful of Takis out of the bag to kill time while she thought fast. “Here’s what you’re going to do today.” He opened the laptop, but she shook her head. “Not yet. Sometimes, if you have a block, or things aren’t going well, it helps to switch from one way of writing to another. So here, this notebook is for you.” She pushed one of the notebooks in front of her across the table to him, along with a pen.
“Write down ten scenes you have in your mind for this book. Don’t think too hard, you don’t have to say that much about them, just note them down, just a few sentences for each one. None of this is set in stone, don’t worry.” She picked up her phone and set the timer. “I’ll give you five minutes. Go.”
He looked at her. She could see the objection in his eyes. She didn’t say anything else; she just looked back at him. After a few seconds, his eyes fell to the paper, and he reached for the pen.
When the timer went off, Beau kept scribbling for a few more seconds. He apparently did have something to say. He looked up at her after he put down his pen. “Okay,” he said. “What now?”
Izzy tried to sound more authoritative than she felt. “Now: Pick one of those scenes, and for the next thirty minutes, write it. Right there in that notebook.” She looked down at her phone and set the timer. “Starting now.”
This time, he did object. “But I can’t. That’s the whole problem. I can’t do that.”
“You can,” she said. “I know that you can. Just—”
He pushed the notebook across the table at her. “I told you I can’t. I’ve tried before, it’s always just bad, and wrong. I thought you were going to teach me how to do this, not just…” He stopped. He looked down at the table for a few seconds, then looked back at her. “Sorry. I interrupted you. Go on.”
She’d been sure he would leave for real this time. “It’s okay if it’s bad,” she said. “Just accept the badness now. For now, it doesn’t matter if it’s bad, it just has to be something. You can fix bad writing, you can’t fix a blank page.” Was she getting through to him? She had no idea. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be just right, and you don’t have to show it to me. I won’t even ask. Just get something on paper. If you get stuck, if you don’t know how to start, just write about me, and how annoyed you are that I’m making you do this, and then get back to it.” She pushed the notebook back across the table to him. “I know you can do this, Beau. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know it.”
He looked down at the notebook, then back at her. She held her breath.
Finally, he picked up a pen and flipped to a blank page. And started writing.
Izzy looked down at her phone so Beau wouldn’t see the relief on her face.
For the next thirty minutes, Izzy read through work emails, ignored Priya’s texts, and tried not to look at Beau. Despite that, though, she noticed when he sped up, when he stopped, when he put his pen down, when he took a deep breath and picked it back up. After the first ten minutes of stopping and starting, he wrote steadily, and she smiled every time she heard him turn a page and keep going.