The Plot (The Book Series, #1)

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Good writers borrow, great writers steal. —T. S. Eliot (but possibly stolen from Oscar Wilde)

All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him.

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.

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.