‘Subtle.’

  ‘Let’s get a coffee first.’

  I already have a coffee. In a mug inscribed Enzo & Sophia 25 years, which I found in an op shop. One day, I’ll use it in a novel: a small, evocative detail. Scott would build a whole plot around it, then leave out the mug.

  ‘I’ll make you a coffee,’ I say.

  ‘We’re two hundred metres from some of the best coffee shops on the planet. In New York I had to walk fifteen blocks to get a decent espresso. We don’t know how lucky we are.’

  ‘I’m not dressed.’

  ‘Put on whatever you need to put on and I’ll get my metaphorical plunger ready. Outside, walk, coffee. Have you been getting out?’

  ‘Not a lot.’

  I’ve barely left the house, living on instant noodles and occasional deliveries of vegetables. I’m probably approaching a pathological level of isolation.

  ‘I’ll wear what I’ve got on. But I don’t want to spend all morning there.’ I can feel myself sounding petulant. At not being able to sit in front of my computer doing nothing.

  Scott leads me to the door. ‘If it works, we’ll do it every morning. Start enjoying where we live.’

  This is what I told myself I’d been missing. But now it feels as if he wants to organise our lives into coffee shops in the morning and galleries in the afternoon and bars in the evening, with no time for writing.

  ‘Smile,’ he says.

  ‘You know how cold it was in Minneapolis?’

  We’re in the cafe courtyard, it’s a blue-sky spring day and my partner, home, wants to tell me tales of his travels—tales that evoke our best times. I try to push back the anxiety. To put the manuscript aside.

  ‘What was your best moment?’ I ask.

  ‘Coming home. It’s okay—tell me about your writing.’

  ‘No, you first, so I can feel like someone who’s capable of a normal relationship.’

  I can see Scott wondering whether to reassure me or tell a story. He makes the choice I’d expect.

  ‘A woman drove to Boston from way out of town—not a young woman, maybe late seventies—so she could tell me that she read The Girl to her sister while she was dying. She said her sister kept herself alive to see how it ended.’

  Scott’s trying not to choke up and again I’m reminded that we’re so different. I want someone to tell me that the poetry of my words illuminated her sister’s final moments; Scott wants the dying woman to hang on to see whether the girl will make it across the flooded river before the stalker spots her. I wonder if she bothered to stay alive for the epilogue.

  ‘You had fun,’ I say. ‘Touring.’

  He’s about to protest, but he knows I’m right. ‘I like being a writer,’ he says. ‘Touring goes with the territory. Now, what about you?’

  ‘I started something new.’

  ‘You got about thirty thousand words into An Abandoned Life and…abandoned it. Right?’

  His guess at where the words stopped coming is gallingly exact. He must have read some study: Unfinished Works: At What Point Do Writers Acknowledge Failure?

  ‘It wasn’t going anywhere,’ I say.

  ‘It was for a while. But you ran out of story.’

  ‘Whatever. But I can’t even get started with the new one. I look at the screen and…I just despair.’

  ‘Maybe that’s your subconscious telling you that the approach you’ve been taking isn’t working.’

  I have to laugh. ‘Subconscious?’

  ‘So, we try something different. A outline, a beat sheet…’

  ‘I’m not going to…’

  Scott puts his hand up, a stop sign, but obeys it himself. He takes a deliberate breath, in, out, and I’m spared another repeat of How to Write like a Screenwriter.

  ‘I’m guessing it’s about a woman who can’t bring herself to leave an exploitative husband.’ He says it kindly, not mocking.

  ‘I didn’t say it was totally new. I’m trying a different angle.’

  ‘Great. But no traditional story. Your mother—the protagonist—is the story. Right?’

  ‘The story is her journey.’

  ‘Her psychological journey. She doesn’t actually go anywhere. Like, leave. And if she doesn’t change, you can’t call it a journey. Or a story.’

  ‘I’m just asking for some help in getting it moving. I’m not asking you to tell me what’s right or wrong with it.’

  ‘And I’m telling you that you won’t get it moving until you fix what’s wrong, which is that it doesn’t have a plot. It’s like…’ He stops. We’ve been here before.

  I look at him, dog-tired behind the coffee and adrenaline brightness. His book isn’t doing well, and I’ve nothing to offer him in exchange for the help I’ve asked for and am now rejecting.

  He puts his cup down and does a little walk to the counter, then back to the table. Tries another tack, into the wind of my intransigence. ‘What’s the biggest decision this character is going to make?’

  ‘She doesn’t make any big decisions. She’s stuck.’

  ‘Biggest action?’

  ‘I told you. She doesn’t shoot anyone.’

  ‘But there’s conflict. With her husband.’

  ‘The conflict’s internal.’

  I can guess how this sounds to a screenwriter: Nothing to see here. It probably also sounds humourless and obsessive and boring. Like the person who’s saying it.

  Scott doesn’t give up. ‘She at least thinks about leaving him. Give us a moment where she has a chance, and the reader’s rooting for her, but she can’t bring herself to take it.’

  ‘I don’t know if that’s going to happen.’

  ‘Of course it is. And every reader will relate. Will I leave? What would my new life look like? What’s he going to do when I tell him?’

  ‘It’s not that dramatic.’

  ‘It is for her. Write that scene. It’ll be great.’

  ‘You can’t write bits and pieces all over the place.’

  ‘I do it all the time. If you did an outline—just a beat sheet—you’d know what needed to be written and where the scene would fit. You could be a bit non-linear. Start with that, do the rest in whatever order you want. Check them off as you go. And one day you’re finished.’

  ‘You make it sound like a construction project.’

  He nods. That’s exactly how he sees it.

  Novelists can be divided into those who plan and those who write by the seat of their pants, letting characters and story and themes emerge organically. I’m a pantser: it’s a way of being, acknowledging that there’s something magic about writing that sets it apart from the professions Scott would liken it to: engineering, building, screenwriting.

  We pantsers have a sense of what we’re going to write, but not in the technical, prescriptive, formulaic way of screenwriters—including those like Scott who’ve reinvented themselves as novelists. Laying it out and locking it down, knowing not only the ending but every big moment, every beat, before they write the first sentence.

  The media portrayed us as a perfect match: Scott the planner, shaping the story, and me the craftsperson, writing the words. I felt like a painter who’d been reduced to colouring in Scott’s outlines.

  Now, as I try to find my own way, in my own way, it’s becoming apparent that the help I’ve been counting on will only come if I do it his way.

  But afterwards, when Scott has set out on his daily walk, I think about my character weighing the possibility of leaving, imagining a new life, and it feels like something I could work towards. Organically.

  3

  Emily

  I’m seated before my Advanced Novel class, only half-listening to Suzanne as she reads aloud. I’ve seen her piece already.

  I wonder what Scott would make of my students—make both in the sense of perception and of moulding. I suppose he’d see the similarities: female, middle-aged, centre-left politics. No make-up, no heels, no nukes.

  I see diversity, because I know them by the way they write. Scott would be focused on their subject matter, and he’d see sameness there too: semi-autobiographical, struggles of ordinary lives, making sense of trauma. No dashing dukes or ticking timebombs. I wonder where people go to learn to write genre fiction.

  Suzanne finishes, and we share our feedback. It’s a beautifully observed, layered piece of writing. The narrative is almost invisible beneath the layers, but there are echoes of other pieces she’s workshopped. She’s positive about the suggestions, including mine.

  Piper has a question, as she usually does. She’s Canadian, early thirties—younger than most of the others—and passionate about social justice. There’s something odd about her appearance that I can’t put my finger on: something inauthentic. Her hair is dyed close to my natural colour, a reddish blond, which is okay, but not what you’d choose if you had all the other options. She was runner-up in the Calibre Prize for an essay about white women’s privilege. We share our successes in class, and Piper has shared hers. At every opportunity.

  ‘I’m just wondering,’ she says to Suzanne, ‘given that this is a novel class, how you’d see your piece fitting into a bigger work. Like, a novel.’

  Suzanne laughs, self-consciously. ‘To be honest, it’s my biggest problem. I only half have the idea of the novel, so I’ve been writing the bits I think I can do best…’

  Piper has a manner of putting questions that makes me feel set-up. Suzanne has never asked for help with this aspect of her writing before; we’re all about workshopping. I’m not sure my fellow teachers would have a good answer. Happily, I do.

  ‘You’re building your novel in a non-linear fashion, which is one way of doing it. To give it some structure, maybe you could look at creating a chapter outline, or what screenwriters call a beat sheet…’

  After class, Piper waits at the end of the queue to talk to me. So she can have as long as she needs without holding anyone else up. She’s cajoled, manipulated, seduced me into giving her more out-of-class time than the rest of the students combined.

  ‘I hope what I said about Suzanne’s novel wasn’t inappropriate. I really…’

  ‘Not at all. No rules about what we can bring up in this class.’

  ‘But what you said was fantastic. It’s so what I’ve been looking for. I guess you’re the only person in this room who’s finished a manuscript, and it’d be great to know…’

  ‘There’s no secret. Just persistence.’

  She nods, but I feel a fraud. I’ve never finished a manuscript by myself. For The Girl, I was working from Scott’s screenplay. What if I don’t have the ability to invent story and characters and themes for a full-length novel?

  Piper hasn’t lined up just to trigger my imposter syndrome. ‘I was wondering if you’d had a chance to look at the short story I sent you,’ she says. ‘I’ve done a lot of work since you last saw it.’

  ‘To be honest, not yet. It’s quite long and this is the… third version you’ve shown me?’

  ‘But it’s getting there, don’t you think? I’ve been told it’s publishable as it stands, but I don’t want to let myself down by putting out something that isn’t a step forward from the Calibre Prize piece.’ She hesitates. ‘Your feedback means a lot to me, and…’

  ‘How are you going with finding a mentor?’

  ‘It’s happening, but…I know I’ve asked you, but that was before the prize…If it worked better for you—we could do it over coffee or even dinner…I’d pay…’

  I feel uncomfortable about rebuffing a promising new writer, but I have to set boundaries. In Piper’s case, it’s not just my time but my space that I want to protect.

  ‘I’m really happy you find my feedback helpful, and I will get to your piece, but I can’t give you special treatment.’

  Scott opens the door while I’m fumbling in my bag for my keys. I can smell garlic and onions frying, and I feel a rush of warmth towards him. It can’t be showing, because he stops halfway to a kiss.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Just feeling a bit insecure.’

  ‘You’ve been comparing someone’s masterpiece with your first draft.’

  ‘At school? No, just something someone said.’

  He doesn’t push, but takes my face in his hands, the two of us still on the doorstep. ‘Say it,’ he says. ‘“I, Emily Glass, got longlisted for the Booker Prize. A panel of eminent judges agreed that of a hundred thousand or so novels published in English that year, mine was in the top thirteen. That’s how well I write and why tonight I’ve been teaching Advanced Novel, when one of my literary heroes only gets to teach Intermediate.”’

  I laugh at the absurd idea that I’ve eclipsed one of Australia’s finest writers, though for two years almost those exact words have been my mantra in the face of self-doubt. But the I—that’s how well I write—is a rare concession from Scott that it was my writing that earned the accolade. He must think we’re in trouble.

  4

  Scott

  We were in trouble as a couple, the same way we’d been in trouble before the book tour. The things that had brought us together—editing over morning coffee, sharing the buzz when we fixed a plot hole, bantering about cover designs for the foreign editions—were slipping away. Overtaken by Emily’s focus on her own writing—her non-writing.

  I have a cynical view of writer’s block. When I was a PR manager, I didn’t have a special place or favourite time of day to write reports or come up with communication strategies. I fronted up and did the job, in the office, on the plane or pulling an all-nighter at home, and woe betide me if I missed a deadline.

  I had a process: strategy, plan, execution, review. In the writing world: concept, outline, draft, edit. You don’t get stuck if you know what you’re going to write. Unless you’re trying to get it perfect first time. As Hemingway said, the first draft of anything is shit. Writing shit isn’t so hard. Then you fix it. Nobody gets editor’s block. Hemingway got a Nobel Prize, writing shit and fixing it up.

  Left to her own devices, Emily didn’t work that way. But I’d seen her write steadily, fluidly, joyfully, all the way into the bestseller charts, critical acclaim and a slew of award nominations. A thousand—sometimes two thousand—words in a day, with time at the end of it to have a drink, kick around ideas and fall in love. Because, back then, she wasn’t trying to create plot and characters and perfect prose at the same time.

  We’d met when I brought her in to write the annual report for my then employer. She was a freelance copywriter, with a line on her CV that caught my attention: ‘Published writer of short stories and aspiring novelist’. Not so far from my ‘Maker of short films and aspiring screenwriter’. Both of us were fitting our dreams around day jobs.

  After she sent a first draft of the report, I organised a meeting. I was always a face-to-face person. Her face was pale, bespectacled, framed by reddish-blond hair. Not nerdy, but not anything else either. In a screenplay, I’d have written: This is EMILY (thirties, attractive but unremarkable, chronically anxious).

  I’d waved the printout of the report. ‘This is fine, but I was hoping you might turn it into more of a story.’

  ‘You’re not happy?’

  ‘As I said, it’s fine. But if you want to throw some of your short-story magic at it and make it stand out, you can bill us for the extra time.’

  She smiled. This is EMILY (thirties, with a smile that lights up the room. Chronically anxious). ‘Maybe if you’d read my short stories, you wouldn’t be asking for that.’

  ‘Where do I find them?’

  ‘Seriously? If you promise not to share it, I’ll send you one I’m working on.’

  She did, and she was right. It was utterly not what I was expecting. I wasn’t surprised that it was an interior story—largely in the narrator’s head, so not a great candidate for adaptation. What I wasn’t prepared for was its sensuality, which would have been a little confronting in an annual report. It was just so frank and so well done. I couldn’t believe she was the writer.

  That was the heart of the attraction: the feeling that I had some private, intimate knowledge of the inner person. She wasn’t interested in me at first: I imagine she read my apparent self-confidence as shallowness. But we had time, because I had an idea which was the reverse of adapting her story.

  We met for an after-work drink. She was still finishing the annual report, and probably thought I had designs on her, which I did. But my opening was completely sincere.

  ‘I wanted to tell you that I loved your story. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read.’

  ‘You need to read more.’

  ‘Gets in the way of writing.’ I could see that she wasn’t sure if I was kidding—I wasn’t—so I cut to the chase.

  ‘I’ve got a proposition. I love your writing.’

  ‘So you said. Thank you. But…’

  ‘I’ve got a screenplay.’ No reaction. Screenwriting wasn’t going to help with the shallowness issue. ‘It was shortlisted for an award.’ Now her expression shifted. ‘The Australian Writers’ Guild Monte Miller Award for an Original Unproduced Feature Length Screenplay.’ I didn’t add ‘by an Unproduced Writer’. ‘But nobody wants to invest in an original screenplay. They want to adapt a bestselling novel.’

  ‘You’re saying you want to be a novelist instead?’

  ‘No, I want you to rewrite my screenplay as a novel. A bestselling novel that will one day be a blockbuster movie.’

  ‘Isn’t that the long way around?’

  ‘It’s the only way around. And if we get halfway around, and only have a bestselling novel…’

  ‘Sorry, do you want a novel or a movie?’

  ‘Do you want a Ferrari or a Lamborghini?’ Damn. Shallow again.

  ‘Neither. What I’d like is a publisher. So, go on.’

  After I’d explained that I’d be giving her plot, characters and dialogue, and either money or co-authorship, I asked the other question: ‘Am I keeping you from dinner?’

  ‘You’re keeping me from writing class. But do you have this screenplay with you?’

  ‘I’ll talk you through it. I’m a better talker than a writer.’

 

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