Whenever we face challenges, we have the privilege of framing them in words – words that express our hopes, our losses, our dreams; words that transform our personal vision or the world’s. These words can become a source of sustenance and discovery, for the sometimes long work of bringing to birth necessary change.

Writing starts with living.

A writer is always writing for someone.

Her tea basket was still lost, but that didn’t seem to matter now. People used to eat loose tea on long journeys. They’d pack it into hard little cakes they’d pull out later, to gnaw on while they warmed their hands by a fire. The tea provided physical sustenance, but it was also considered good for the soul.

Tea was more than boiling water. There were decisions to be made and a frame of mind to develop, no matter how imperceptible.

This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren’t there, but might be. And even that didn’t matter if, in the end, readers needed something to be there. They could bring their somethings to a text, as co-creators, embedding a needed reality in the story that, if it was flexible enough, would allow new threads to take their place beside the author’s.

Maybe Laura’s real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die—if not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name.

Have tea, might write,” Laura returned.

Laura thought Bell would have a few things to say to Pynchon. And Laura had a few things to say to Bell, like, How the hell was a writer supposed to know when she was one-fifth through her novel-writing, so she could cut a door into the wall and shove her character out into the forest?

One Bagatelle, and I’ll raise you a novel,” Megan had tweeted back.“Writing for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire,” Laura returned.“Writing for me,” Megan had typed.“I’ll write you a tea fortune.”“No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.