not yet

INT. APARTMENT – NIGHT
Her book lying on the table.

HIM
It’s about me.

HER
Maybe.

HIM
Not maybe. You said it. And this “He loved the sound of his own voice more than the truth”… that’s some dumb shit you’d say about me too.

HER
(smiles)
So you admit you lie?

HIM
Don’t twist it. The beach scene? The one where we talked about my girl? Never happened.

HER
Exactly. Because it’s not you.

HIM
It is. Just rearranged. You cut what you didn’t like and invented the rest.

HER
That’s writing.

HIM
Nope. That’s you hiding behind fiction to avoid consequence.
I asked my attorney. I can hit you with a cease and desist.

HER
So, it’s cool when you do it, but a problem when I do it?

HIM
Stop.

HER
Oh, that’s funny. I’ve dated men who’ve made whole albums about women, the sex, the fights, the breakups, and nobody called them liars. Nobody accused them of being “psychotic.”

HIM
It’s not the same.

HER
How is it not the same? Because you’re a guy? Because when a man mines my life for material, it’s “truth,” but when I do it, it’s vendetta?

HIM
(raising voice, theatrical)
Because it’s fucking music!

HER
Ok, so you didn’t write a song calling me a whore?

HIM
I didn’t name names.

HER
(laughs)
Neither did I!

HER (cont’d)
Besides, this character isn’t just you. Get over yourself.
It’s you, Hector, Cole …

HIM
I don’t care how you Frankensteined it. Some of it’s real, most of it’s not.

He drops the book like it’s toxic.
She chuckles, picks it up.

HER (calm, deliberate)
It’s not about you.
I haven’t written what I want to write about you.

A beat.

HER (cont’d)
Not yet.

This conversation didn’t happen. Not exactly. But fiction, when it’s honest, is rarely conjured from nothing. It’s assembled from lived texture, a patchwork of exchanged words, habits noticed but never commented on, private and intimate moments between two people that no one else witnessed. Writers take these fragments and reconfigure them into something new. And once they’re stitched together, the original source is less important than the finished work; and if the piece is good enough, it no longer needs its origins to justify its existence.

The man in this scene is angry because he recognizes himself in fragments. A line of dialogue here. A gesture there. Enough to feel exposed, but not enough for anyone else to make the connection unless he says it aloud. That’s the point: the writer decides how much of someone survives on the page, and in what form.

Men have done this for centuries, often without question, especially in the worlds I’ve known. In music, it’s almost tradition. Rapper boyfriends, industry men, storytellers mining the women in their lives for material. Fights, flaws, and tenderness repurposed into verses and hooks. Entire careers built on autobiographical confessionals thinly veiled as “just art.” No one calls them obsessive. No one accuses them of turning their partners into villains or caricatures. They’re celebrated for their vulnerability, celebrated for their “realness,” and the relatability of their raw truth.

But when a woman does the same? The act is reclassified. Pathology instead of craft. She becomes the victim who can’t let go, the romanticizing maniac, the emotional hoarder. Her work is read as confession rather than construction, her narratives assumed to be memoir in costume. The male artist is praised for building mythology; the female artist is accused of keeping score.

That double standard is the shadow across this scene. His outrage is not only personal, it’s cultural. The idea that he, a man, could be used as source material by a woman the way men have used women for decades without consequence feels like a violation of an unspoken rule.

I haven’t written about you. Not yet.

In this context, the line isn’t a throwaway, it’s a reversal. A refusal to submit to the old rules, and a reminder that the writer holds the same license men have always claimed for themselves, and she’s willing to use it.

This piece didn’t fit into a larger narrative because it’s too direct in its reversal. It pulls back the curtain and shows the machinery. That characters are not people, but constructs; that “truth” in art is a matter of arrangement, not fidelity. And yes, it risks being read as defensive rather than deliberate. But it belongs here, on the Cutting Room floor, because in isolation it doesn’t have to explain itself. It can stand alone, and it hums with implication.

It was important for me to include because women’s authorship still lives under suspicion. Because the moment a woman builds a man into her work, as hero, antagonist, or something in between, she’s accused of obsession or romanticizing rather than authorship. And because sometimes the most radical thing a woman can do in her art is exactly what men have done all along: take the pieces she wants, change what she needs, and write without asking permission.

So this scene stays… not as explanation but as quiet assertion. It’s a record of reversal and a reminder that if the wound and the weapon are the same hand, women are just as capable of wielding both, and just as unwilling to let them go dull.