“It’s the truth. Bad pages are useful. Blank pages are only smug.”
He laughed, then quickly looked down at the pad. He wrote his name in the top corner, erased it, then wrote it again in a smaller print. I sat beside him, letting the silence stretch without pressure.
After a minute, he said, “How do you know if a story is good?”
“Oh, there are many ways.”
“That’s not helpful.”
I shifted slightly in the chair. “A good story usually knows what its character wants, even when the character is wrong about what they need.”
He frowned at the paper. “That sounds complicated.”
“People are complicated in real life, so that should translate into fictional stories.”
“What if the character wants something impossible?”
I shifted closer. “Then the story becomes even more interesting.”
When he looked at me, I saw the cautious boy beneath the charming one. “What if he wants to go somewhere that doesn’t exist?”
“Then perhaps the question is why he needs to go there so badly,” I said.
CJ swallowed and looked back at the page. “Maybe because it’s better.”
“Better how?”
“Nobody ever leaves.”
There were many ways to answer that. Most of them would have been too heavy for a sick eleven-year-old who looked so small in his father’s bed.
So, I chose a gentle approach. “That’s a powerful reason to write.”
His fingers tightened around the pencil. “You think so?”
“I do.”
He pressed the tip of the pencil to the page, then stopped again. “What about twists?”
“Oh. Twists are very important.”
“What makes them good?”
“A twist is only as good as its setup,” I said. “If it comes out of nowhere, readers feel cheated. If they could have seen it coming but didn’t, they feel rewarded.”
He nodded slowly. “So, you have to hide the truth in plain sight.”
“Exactly.”
His eyes lit then, faint but unmistakable. “That’s hard.”
“Yes.”
“I could do hard.”
“I suspect you could.”
He starting writing, his face changing as he worked. He became less guarded, more absorbed as he filled line after line with his messy, slanted script.
