Mariana: I'm celebrating. That's 512 more than last week. What broke the dam?
I stare at the message. What broke the dam was a conversation on a beach with a man whose voice sounds like gravel wrapped in velvet, but I'm not telling my agent that.
Me: Change of scenery. The retreat is working.
Diana Hartwell's workshop starts at ten in the main parlor, which has been converted into a writing studio with armchairs arranged in a circle. Very therapy chic. Very let's excavate our deepest emotional wounds and turn them into prose.
The other writers file in with notebooks and laptops and the cautious optimism of people who still believe a two-hour session can fix whatever's wrong with them. I position myself near the window because natural light is good for creativity, or at least for staying awake.
Diana sweeps in at exactly ten, coffee in hand, reading glasses perched on her nose. She sits, crosses her legs, and surveys us with an attention so measured and deliberate that you feel simultaneously seen and dissected.
"Let's talk about emotion," she says. "Specifically, why most of you are faking it."
Silence. The poet shifts in her chair.
"Fiction is lying," Diana continues. "We all know that. But the best fiction is lying in a way that tells a deeper truth. And the worst fiction—the stuff that gets rejected, forgotten, shelved—isfiction that feels fake. Not in the plot. Not in the dialogue. In the emotion."
She looks directly at me. Or it feels like she does. Maybe she's looking at the thriller writer beside me. But the weight of it lands on my sternum like a brick.
"The question isn't what does your character feel. That's easy. Sad, angry, in love—we can all label emotions. The question is how does it live in their body. Where does it sit. What does it taste like. What do they do with their hands."
I think about my manuscript. My heroine, standing in that doorway, feeling... what? I've written her heart raced and she felt a pang of longing and all the other shortcuts that say emotion without ever making the reader feel it.
"I want you to write a scene," Diana says. "No plot. No dialogue. Just a character sitting with a feeling they can't name. Two hundred words. You have twenty minutes."
Laptops open. Keyboards click. I stare at my screen and try to think of a feeling I can't name.
What comes out isn't about my heroine.
The coffee is wrong. Not bad—just wrong. Too smooth, too easy, missing the bitter edge that proves it's real. She wraps her hands around the mug and focuses on the heat because the heat is simple and heat doesn't lie. Outside, the ocean delivers its reliable performance—wave, crash, retreat—and she wants to hate it for being so predictable. Predictable is what her ex called her. Predictable, and married to outlines, and too rigid to?—
The mug burns. Good. Something that cuts through the film of numbness she's been wearing like a second skin. She puts it down, watches a red crescent bloom across her palm, and thinks: this is what feeling something looks like. Small and sharp and completely her own fault.
When Diana asks for volunteers to share, I keep my mouth shut. The poet reads something lovely about grief. The memoirist reads something raw about rage. The thriller writer reads a scene about paranoia that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
Diana nods at each one, offering small, precise observations. Then her gaze finds me.
"Kassidy. Read yours."
It isn't a request. I clear my throat, read the passage, and watch Diana's expression shift from professional interest to something warmer.
"That," she says, "is the difference between telling us a character is struggling and making us struggle with her. The coffee. The burn. The completely her own fault. That's where the book lives."
My face is on fire, but the words glow inside me like a small, stubborn flame.
"The trick," Diana adds, leaning back, "is doing that for three hundred pages. Without letting it eat you alive."
Comforting.
The workshop breaks at noon, and I drift toward the veranda with my laptop, intending to ride this fragile momentum into actual manuscript pages. The air smells like salt and jasmine, and the wind has picked up since morning—not enough to be uncomfortable, but enough to flip pages and tangle hair.
Tucker Brennan appears at the edge of the veranda, and my body registers him before my brain does. A slight tightening in my core. A sharpening of focus, like the world just increased its resolution by ten percent.
He's carrying two mugs. One he sets on the table beside a security colleague—a stocky guy with a buzz cut who nods thanks—and the other he brings to the opposite end of the veranda. Near me. Not to me. Just near.
"Coffee?" he asks, like it's a coincidence, like he didn't walk the length of the porch to end up within conversation distance.
"I had coffee."
