“No good,” said Haruhi flatly, thrusting the manuscript back.
“It’s not good enough?” whined Asahina. “But I thought about it really hard…”
“Yeah, no way. Not even close. It’s got no punch.” Haruhi leaned back in the chair at her brigade chief’s desk and grabbed the red pen she’d stuck behind her ear. “Just for starters, this introduction is such a cliché. ‘Once upon a time’? It’s got no freshness to it at all. It needs a twist. The intro has to be super catchy, got it? First impressions are critical.”
“But,” said Asahina tremulously, “that’s how fairy tales are supposed to start…”
“That thinking is obsolete!” Haruhi’s rejection was haughty and total. “You need to transform your approach. If you think you might have heard something before, then do the opposite. That’s the way to bring something new to life.”
I got the feeling that the reason it felt like we were leaving the original point of all this activity far behind was thanks to the system Haruhi had just described. It certainly wasn’t like the threatening feint of a pitcher who’s trying to hold a fast runner at first base, but just doing the opposite wasn’t going to work either.
“Anyway, this is no good.” Haruhi deliberately wrote “rewrite” with her red pen on the copy-paper manuscript, then tossed it into a cardboard box beside the desk. In the box (which formerly had contained oranges) was a mountain of papers she’d decided was bound for the incinerator. “Write something new.”
“Ugh…”
Shoulders slumping, Asahina made her way back to her own seat. She looked truly pathetic. I felt violently sympathetic to her as she picked up a pencil, then held her head in her hands.
I cast my gaze over to a corner of the table from which emanated nothing at all, and there was that most important fixture for the clubroom: Nagato, who was not reading.
“…”
She stared at the display of the laptop computer in front of her, stock-still, typing something on the keyboard every few seconds, whereupon she would turn inanimate yet again.
Nagato was using the laptop we’d won in our battle against the computer club. Similar machines were in front of both Koizumi and myself, their CPU cooling fans spinning away despite the CPUs themselves not really having anything to think about. Koizumi’s fingers typed away deftly, the sound of each keystroke grating on my nerves. How nice for him, that he’d decided what he was going to write about.
Asahina, the only one of us to express a prejudice against using machines, was writing by hand on a sheet of copy paper, but she’d stopped, as though synchronized with me.
Of course I’d stopped. How was I supposed to type with nothing to write?
“That goes for everybody else too!” Haruhi alone was strangely energetic. “If you don’t hurry to hand in those manuscripts and get the editing done, you won’t make it in time for publication. Time to shift into high gear! Just think a little harder and you’ll be able to write something. It’s not like we’re writing epics or aiming for literary prizes here.”