Page 37 of If I Stopped Haunting You

He watched, mystified, as she reached over her keyboard and deleted them. They disappeared one by one until her document went blank.

Sighing, she slumped in her seat, curling in on herself.

“Why’d you delete them?” he asked.

Her head shot up, gray eyes meeting his. “What?” She flipped her braid over her shoulder, exposing her neck and making the words stick in his throat.

“The words,” he croaked. He cleared his throat and waved a hand at her computer. “You deleted the words.”

She scrunched up her nose, and leaning forward, folded her arms on the table and rested her head on them. Her voice was muffled as she said, “They weren’t good.”

“But they’re still words,” Neil argued. He didn’t understand. He never edited as he wrote, instead preferring to write as much as possible in one go and tear the draft apart later. First draftswere never good, that was the point. Write the book and fill in the flesh of the story later.

She sat up, sighing again. Skinner sighed often, soft exhales marking her annoyance, her exhaustion. Strangely, he found he rather liked the sound.

Skinner shook her head. “Most of the time, I try not to erase anything until the second draft. Sometimes, I can move the words to another spot entirely, and reuse them in different contexts. But those words,” she said, pointing to the screen, “they were terrible. Sometimes, it’s best not to write at all than to write terribly.”

He narrowed his eyes, leaning forward. “Do you have any hobbies?”

“Not really, just reading.”

“Okay,” he drawled, tapping the table, and thinking. “If I played, say, the piano—”

“You would play the piano.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” she snorted, waving her hand at him. “Continue.”

“If I playedpiano,and I only practiced when I felt like it, do you think I would get better?” She opened her mouth to respond, but he held up a hand, leaning closer. “If we only practice things when we are good, we’ll never getgood. You have to dig through the nasty before you can get to the good.”

Skinner watched him for a long moment, and Neil squirmed under her scrutiny.

“You’re oddly good at pep talks.”

Neil smiled, the comment oddly warming. “I know. It’s because I practiced.”

“You’re not good at being humble.”

He frowned. “I know you think I’m some big shot or something, but I promise, it’s never been easy. I’m not this confident guy you’ve made me out to be. I’m constantly second guessingmyself, watching everything I do to see when I’ll fail because I know I will.”

Skinner stared blankly up at him, her expression inscrutable. He squirmed under her attention, and she said nothing as the others rejoined them, mugs refilled, snacks piled in their arms. Neil wished she’d sigh again. But Skinner didn’t look at him as Laszlo tapped the timer on his phone.

“Begin!” he called.

This time, Neil tried.

Though his speech had been gallant, and he’d meant what he’d said, sometimes there were no good words. Neil could be inspired, and still, nothing he wrote was worth the breath. He deleted and retyped the same sentence in six different variations:

She ran through the halls. Ran through the halls she did. And so, she ran. Through the halls. She galloped through the halls. She ran fast through the halls. She ran through the halls.

Neil glared at his screen. He was neither Yoda nor a horse, and he was certain both the first and the last iteration were the same. He’d tried,oh,he’d tried. Neil had thought if he switched the words around, if he found the correct path of the action, it would suddenly be okay. The story would flow from him like some unstopped dam of creativity, but that’s not how these things worked.

In the end, there was still no plot, no characters, just a vague action and a vague girl running (or galloping) through the halls. He had no story, no sense of a plot. Neil was, once again, lost.

Failed, he’d failed again.

Laszlo’s phone beeped, the round of ten minutes up.