In the last few months, I’ve written three stories.

Two were stories I was asked to write. One is a retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” from the ogress’s perspective. (You don’t remember an ogress in “Sleeping Beauty”? Read the Charles Perrault version, originally published in 1697. There’s an ogress . . .) Another is the secret history of Mina Harker, whom you may remember from Dracula. The fairy tale retelling is for an anthology; the Dracula retelling is for my next short story collection, coming out in 2025 from Tachyon Publications. The third story, which I finished just yesterday, is one I wrote for myself, although of course I’ll try to publish it somewhere. It comes from an incident I saw in Budapest — an older woman who, to my surprise, stopped by the planter in front of my apartment building, pulled up a plant, put it in a plastic bag, and walked away. She stole a plant! I stood and stared, astonished. And of course it gave me the idea for a story.

People sometimes ask me how I get ideas for stories, or whether I have trouble coming up with ideas, and I say no — the ideas are the easy part. There are ideas quite literally everywhere. They fall out of the air like rain. A woman steals flowers, I read a poem or hear a song, I read a book and think That’s a great plot but I would do it differently, I visit a beautiful place and it gives me a story. There are stories everywhere I go. The hard part is writing them down, and the even harder part is finding time — that is literally the hardest part for me, because I so often have very little time. And the most difficult thing about writing, for me,  is prioritizing my writing time.

I don’t know if you have this problem, but it’s very difficult for me to prioritize what I would most like to do over my obligations to other people. I’m very lucky to have a job that I love, which is teaching. But I have obligations to many other people — my students, my department, my university. And then there are obligations to family and friends, which are important as well. Sometimes, writing feels like an obligation only to myself — if I don’t write, it will affect only me, whereas if I don’t grade essays or write letters of recommendation or participate on the assessment committee, it will affect other people. It’s easier to let myself down than to let other people down.

And yet, it seems to me that there is another perspective: if I don’t write them, I let the stories down. And I let down anyone who may want to read those stories, who might find some benefit from them, even if it’s the ability to get away from our difficult world for a while. And I do know this about myself as a writer — I have a power to take people away from this world and transport them somewhere else. That is one thing I know I can do. Beyond that, there is something more difficult to describe — I let down wherever those stories came from. I’m not arrogant enough to think those stories came solely from me. I don’t just think them up. Parts of them come from me, certainly. But when I’m writing, it feels as though the story is being told through me, in collaboration with me. The source of stories is pouring through me like a river, and I am both channeling it and riding it on some sort of writing kayak. It’s as though I’ve been given a job by the university, which is to teach students — and I hope I do that job well, but I’ve also been given a job by the universe, which is to tell whatever stories are out there to be told.

I suppose thinking about it this way may also help with the other problem, when you’re a writer, of feeling as though there are already so many stories out there. Walk into a bookstore or library — you will be overwhelmed (or at least I am). And then there are all the shows on Netflix, all the videos on YouTube. There are already so many stories, most of them more spectacular than mine. I mean, how could what I write compete with a Netflix series?

And yet. You never know what will be important. There was that guy, the one you would probably have avoided if you had seen him in a café, because he was, admit it, kind of weird. And he painted these weird paintings which you probably wouldn’t have bought, because no one was buying them. There he was, in the small town of Arles, and almost no one was paying attention to him, and he was painting and painting and painting. And now one of his paintings is on my umbrella, which is as close as I will ever get to owning a Van Gogh. So you never know.

All you can do, as a writer, is try to let go of your ego as much as possible, and write the stories that are given to you, as best you can. Like painting and acting and dance, it’s one of the great humbling professions. You will fail again and again and again, because failure is the essence of trying to create anything. And whenever you walk into a bookstore or library, you can see all the great writers, right there on the shelves — you can see that Virginia Woolf is already there, and F. Scott Fitzgerald is already there, and you’re not going to be as great as they are, because no writer can be another writer. You’re going to have to figure out how to be great, or even pretty good, or maybe even not very good, in your own way.

This is, perhaps, why AI will in the end not be very helpful for writers of anything more complicated than undergraduate essays (and not even in those, I would argue). You need to have your own failures before you can have your own successes. AI isn’t telling the stories the universe gave you to tell. It’s telling bits and pieces of stories that other writers told, patched together like the Patchwork Girl of Oz. Using AI to create a story makes you, not a writer, but an editor, which is a different job altogether. I’m sure there are people who will disagree with me, but for me, writing is in the direct engagement with the words on the page. It’s in the intersection between what comes to me from somewhere outside myself, and the skill and thought I put into capturing it, structuring it. It’s dancing with the universe, not with a machine.

So, what will I do with my flower thief story? Well, I have a few ideas. Right now, all three stories still need some revisions, so next week I will be a reviser rather than a writer. But my goal for this year, especially for the next few months, is to create space and time for writing. After all, I have an obligation to the universe. And the rest of it — whether my stories are published, whether they find an audience, whether they eventually appear on umbrellas (all right, here I’m kidding — a little), all of that is ultimately up to the Fates, who always have their own agenda.

(The image is Old Woman Watering Flowers by Gerard Dou.)