“You’re making a mistake,” I said. “It’s a waste of time. People want stories that have energy, not ones that are primped and groomed like hothouse flowers.”

She took a sip of her drink and said she didn’t get it. Did I mean too delicate or too showy? She’s a clever girl, she knew just what I meant, but she’ll never admit to reading her father’s mind. I meant it was just too careful. She can’t pull this stunt off, writing only one word a day for five hundred days. I call that wasting her gifts all in the name of self-control, when she ought to be exploiting them. If this keeps up, I can imagine her in a few years sitting on top of a pillar in the desert or taking up residence in a cave. I didn’t raise her to be an ascetic. I can’t take this kind of thing.

Five days into this experiment I asked her how she was doing.

All she said was, “‘There was something in the.’” There was something in the. Nothing else.

Two days later I went and knocked on her door and asked her again.

She said, “‘There was something in the way the.’”

Sounds like a terrible start to me, but she’ll never take my advice. Children are like that—would rather self-destruct than listen to their parents. I asked her what she was doing with my money, what all these writing classes were for, if that’s all she was going to do and I was only going to see five hundred words hanging off the end of my twelve thousand dollars.

I went out the next day, the eighth day, because I couldn’t stand to be in the same house with it, the little tiny creeping silence she was making up there. She wasn’t going to do anything but write one word, and then I don’t know what she did. I went out and saw a movie. But I couldn’t watch it, I couldn’t think. All I was thinking was, noun? Or is it going to be an adjective finally? I was digging up the grammar I learned in grade school trying to think of what she might come up with next. Adverb? But it was worse than that.

I started to have nightmares. I’m not prone to anxiety, normally, but this was getting creepy. I could almost feel something living in the house, something growing monstrously inside it, but slowly, shoot by shoot. It was curling and climbing in the room up there, and I could feel it as soon as I walked in the door. I never saw her anymore, but she must have left sometimes, to go out and do things. There was no more her, just words. I wanted it over with, I wanted her to finish the thing or forget it. But there were still four hundred and eight-eight days left, and there was something in the way the words came together so slowly.