Chapter 8: Genre, Reading, and writing

“No.” She smiled, shaking her head, missing the feeling of hair slapping against her face. A feeling that used to annoy her. “You stick in genre. You like historical fiction, fantasy, and mystery. Nothing wrong with that. You don’t like traditional literature.”

“Fuck no.” He made the face of a child forced to eat lima beans. “They make you read that in school.”

“And you’re twenty-six?”

His face became suddenly serious, and he stared hard at her. “How old are you, Autumn?”

He was right. She was being a bitch. This was all new to him, and he had to be nervous. At least as nervous as she was. “Never mind that. We have a few genres to pick from now.”

“Are you going to write a novel too?”

Her voice got very small. “I don’t know.”

He dropped his hands off the table and let the serious look melt away. “Do you write every day?”

“I try to.” It was the literal truth. She didn’t mean that she made an effort to find time each day to write. She meant that every day, she spent time trying to write. It used to be that she would sit down in front of the computer and just pump it all out. She used to be actually able to write. Not recently. She couldn’t write anymore. She just tried to. She downed another gulp of the scorching hot coffee to stop herself thinking about that. No point getting depressed already. The day was still young.

“Should I?”

“Definitely.” She nodded. “Three months isn’t very long.”

“How long is a novel?” He was back to his childlike wonder. It was actually, when she thought about it, somewhat refreshing. Made him look younger, even as his eyes made him look older. Weird little effect.

“Anywhere from sixty to one hundred thousand words.”

His face screwed up. He opened his mouth to make a comment, then closed it again and scratched his chin. Finally, he cocked his head the side, gave a cute little smile, and flashed her bedroom eyes. “How long is that in pages?”

“Two hundred fifty to four hundred pages.” She forced herself not to fan herself, though she did feel suddenly warm.

He chuckled. “Do all writers think in words?”

“No.” She smiled, looking down at the table and away from him. “Just the neurotic ones.”

“Well, three months is ninety days.” He did a quick calculation in his head, and his tongue slipped out over his top lip, just for a second. “Three pages a day and I’ve got it. Maybe four or even five just to be safe.”

Autumn laughed. “We’re a long way from there, Steve-o. You can’t start writing until you know what you’re doing. You don’t even have a story yet.”

“Well, you’re here to help me with that, right?”

She shrugged. “That’s the idea, yeah.” She took a deep breath. “Once you have your idea, once you get inspired, then it’ll all start coming out. So, we need to find something that will inspire you. What kind of—“

Steve’s words stopped her cold. “What inspires you, Autumn?”

“What?” She felt the world spin around her. She had been about to start talking about where ideas came from, how to avoid discouragement; all the things she thought a good teacher should say. But when he had asked that question, way out from left field, it just kind of slammed into her, leaving her with nothing more to say than just, “what?”

“Well, you’ve written a book, right? So you got an idea somewhere. Where did you get your ideas?”

“You get ideas from lots of places. Sometime when you’re in the line at a store, or walking down the street, or imbibing embarrassingly copious amounts of alcohol. They come at the strangest times.”

“Okay, sure. But what inspires you? I mean, what really gets your mojo flowing? What hits you? You know, hard. Right where it counts? Music? Nature? The city? What?”

Autumn squirmed a bit in her seat. She tried to run a hand through her hair, and instead found herself rubbing the remnants of her hair, now barely more than stubble. “I don’t know,” she said. It had been so long since she’d gone looking for inspiration. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she just needed a change of venue, a new place from which to view the world. Why do I stand on my desk? Not to look taller, but to remind myself to constantly look at the world from new perspectives. “I like music. I write reviews for local papers.”

“Okay, that’s a start.” He smiled. “Do you write with music playing?”

She cleared her throat and sat up straighter. Who was the teacher here? “I do, yes. But not everyone does. Some writers have to sit in absolute silence. Some watch television. Some write outside where they can hear the noise of cars all around. Some write in the dark. It depends on the writer.”

“So how do I do it?”

“You write however you feel the most comfortable and creative.”

“Okay. No problem. But what about the idea? Where do we get that?”

She was stumped. If she had an answer to give him, she wouldn’t have needed to take the job in the first place. Where do ideas come from?

“People always ask writers that question,” she said, gulping down the last of her coffee, making a face as it burned its way down her throat. “I don’t really know how to answer it. I used to think of clever responses to give people, but they were all bullshit. Ideas don’t come from some magical place. They just come.”

“But how?”