Jake read it through twice. There wasn’t much to it, really, but it refused to punch its way through, even so.

He was dead? He was dead. And … Jake looked now at the date. This had not happened recently, either. This had happened … incredibly, it had happened only a couple of months after their own doomed attempt at a teacher-student relationship. Jake hadn’t even realized that Evan was a Vermonter, or that his parents and sister were already dead, which was very tragic in light of the fact that he was fairly young, himself. Not one of these things had ever come up in conversation between them, of course. They’d had no conversation, really, about anything else but Evan Parker’s remarkable novel in progress. And even that, not much. For the rest of the Ripley session, in fact, his student had been downright reticent in workshop, and he had declined or not turned up for the remaining one-on-one conferences. Jake had even wondered if Parker regretted sharing his extraordinary novel idea with his teacher, or if he’d at least thought better of sharing it with his peers in the workshop, but he himself never let on that he had been told anything about what Parker was working on, or that he thought it was at all out of the ordinary. When the session ended, this pompous, withholding, and profoundly irritating person had simply gone away, presumably to do what he needed to do in order to bring his book to the light. But actually, just to die. Now he was gone and his book, in all likelihood, unwritten.

Later, of course, Jake would go back to this moment. Later, he would recognize it for the crossroads it was, but already he was wrapping this stark, years-after-the-fact set of circumstances in the first of what would be many layers of rationalization. Those layers had not much at all to do with the fact that Jake was a moral human being with, presumably, a code of ethical conduct. Mainly they had to do with the fact that he was a writer, and being a writer meant another allegiance, to something of even higher value.

Which was the story itself.

Jake didn’t believe in much. He didn’t believe that any god had made the universe, let alone that said god was still watching the goings-on and keeping track of every human act, all for the purpose of assigning a few millennia of Homo sapiens to a pleasant or an unpleasant afterlife. He didn’t believe in an afterlife. He didn’t believe in destiny, fate, luck, or the power of positive thinking. He didn’t believe that we get what we deserve, or that everything happens for a reason (what reason would that be?), or that supernatural forces impacted anything in a human life. What was left after all of that nonsense? The sheer randomness of the circumstances we are born into, the genes we’ve been dealt, our varying degrees of willingness to work our asses off, and the wit we may or may not possess to recognize an opportunity. Should it arise.

But there was one thing he actually did believe in that bordered on the magical, or at least the beyond-pedestrian, and that was the duty a writer owed to a story.

Stories, of course, are common as dirt. Everyone has one, if not an infinity of them, and they surround us at all times whether we acknowledge them or not. Stories are the wells we dip into to be reminded of who we are, and the ways we reassure ourselves that, however obscure we may appear to others, we are actually important, even crucial, to the ongoing drama of survival: personal, societal, and even as a species.

But stories, despite all that, are also maddeningly elusive. There is no deep mine of them to blast around in, or big-box store with wide aisles of unused, undreamed-of, and thrillingly new narratives for a writer to push a big, empty shopping cart through, waiting for something to catch their eye. Those seven story lines Jake had once measured against Evan Parker’s not very exciting mother and daughter in an old house—Overcoming the Monster? Rags to Riches? Journey and Return?—they were the same seven story lines writers and other storytellers had been rummaging around in forever. And yet …

And yet.

Every now and then, some magical little spark flew up out of nowhere and landed (yes, landed) in the consciousness of a person capable of bringing it to life. This was occasionally called “inspiration,” though “inspiration” was not a word writers themselves tended to use.

Those magical little sparks tended not to waste time in declaring themselves. They woke you up in the mornings with an annoying tap, tap and a sense of unfolding urgency, and they hounded you through the days that followed: the idea, the characters, the problem, the setting, lines of dialogue, descriptive phrases, an opening sentence.

To Jake, the word that comprised the relationship between a writer and their spark was “responsibility.” Once you were in possession of an actual idea, you owed it a debt for having chosen you, and not some other writer, and you paid that debt by getting down to work, not just as a journeyman fabricator of sentences but as an unshrinking artist ready to make painful, time-consuming, even self-flagellating mistakes. Rising to this responsibility was a matter of facing your blank page (or screen) and muzzling the critics inside your head, at least long enough for you to get some work done, all of which was profoundly difficult and none of which was optional. What’s more, you stepped away from it at your peril, because if you failed in this grave responsibility you might well find, after some period of distraction, or even less than fully committed work, that your precious spark had … left you.

Gone, in other words, as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had appeared, and your novel along with it, though you might spin your wheels for a few months or a few years or the rest of your life, hopelessly throwing words onto the page (or screen) in a stubborn refusal to face what had happened.

And there was something else: an extra, dark superstition for any writer hubristic enough to ignore the spark of a great idea, even if that writer was not of a religious bent, even if he did not believe that “everything happens for a reason,” even if, indeed, he resisted magical thinking of every other conceivable kind. The superstition held that if you did not do right by the magnificent idea that had chosen you, among all possible writers, to bring it to life, that great idea didn’t just leave you to spin your stupid and ineffectual wheels. It actually went to somebody else. A great story, in other words, wanted to be told. And if you weren’t going to tell it, it was out of here, it was going to find another writer who would, and you would be reduced to watching somebody else write and publish your book.

Intolerable.

Jake remembered the day a certain key moment in The Invention of Wonder had suddenly been there with him, in the world—no preamble, no warning—and despite the fact that this had never happened to him before, his very first thought in the instant that followed its appearance had been:

Grab it.

And he had. And he had done right by that spark, and written the best novel he could around it, the New & Noteworthy first book that had turned—so fleetingly—the attention of the literary world in his direction.

He’d lacked even a pallid little frisson of an idea with Reverberations (his “novel in linked short stories,” which had really only ever been … short stories), though obviously he had finished that book, limping along to some point at which he was permitted to type the words “The End.” It had been the end, all right, to his period of “promise” as “a young writer to watch,” and it might have been wiser not to publish it at all, but Jake had been terrified to lose the validation of The Invention of Wonder. After each and every one of the legacy publishers, and then an entire tranche of the university presses, had rejected the manuscript, the importance of publishing his second book had swelled until his entire being seemed to be on the line. If he could only get this one out of his way, he’d told himself at the time, maybe the next idea, the next spark, would come.

Only it hadn’t. And while he’d continued to have the occasional crusty and serviceable idea in the years since—boy grows up in family obsessed with dog breeding, man discovers older sibling has been institutionalized since birth—there’d been nothing tap, tapping away at him, compelling him to write. The work he’d done since then, on these and a couple of even worse ideas, had petered, excruciatingly, out.