The Plot

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 rea

Good writers borrow, great writers steal, Jake was thinking. That ubiquitous phrase was attributed to T. S. Eliot (which didn’t mean Eliot hadn’t, himself, stolen it!),

a Coming of Age story, or Bildungsroman, or maybe a Rags to Riches story—but

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

majordomo

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

They wanted to learn and get better, and they were on the whole open to his insights and suggestions, so when he told them he couldn’t tell from their actual words on the page what a character looked like or what they cared about, or that he didn’t feel compelled to go along with them on their personal journeys because he hadn’t been sufficiently e

Greater minds than Jake’s (and even, he was willing to bet, than Evan Parker’s) had identified the few essential plots along which pretty much every story unfurled itself: The Quest, The Voyage and Return, Coming of Age, Overcoming the Monster, et al.