No pressure.
Izzy flipped open her notebook and picked up a pen. “Okay.” She looked at the list she’d made the day before. “How much do you have already? Let’s start there.”
He looked away from her. “Nothing.”
“What?” She couldn’t help her reaction. “What do you mean, nothing? You said you’ve been working on it for a while.”
He looked down at the closed laptop in front of him on the table. “I have been. But I’ve deleted all of it.”
“All of it?” she said. This was going to be a lot harder than she’d thought.
Beau stood up. “Yes, okay? Yes, I’ve deleted everything. None of it was working. This isn’t going to work either, I don’t know why I agreed to it.”
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—”