One rainy afternoon, on a rainy day in Summer, journalist William Godfrey found his way into the home office of author Nathalie Singer. She was a woman of unprecedented talent, known across the globe for powerful and moving works of fiction. Long ago, the New York Times had dubbed her the genius of our times, and her sales figures backed up these claims ten times over. As William stalked across the hardwood floors, notepad in one hand and voice recorder in the other, he began thinking about what he was here to do.

He was on a hunt for secrets.

He needed to understand this woman. He needed to know what talents, what skills, what hidden potentials lay beneath her genius. He had covered famous authors before, and each had told him harrowing tales of deprivation, strife and the creative fire that lead them to their craft but in all his research he had been unable to find anything in Nathalie’s past that could explain the sheer power of her prose. He needed to know how she could rise so spectacularly in the hyper-competitive world of print, and how she had earned the almost unprecedented critical and commercial acclaim that had been heaped onto her.

Today he would have his answers.

“Good afternoon Miss Singer, thank you for taking the time to answer my preliminary questions. I know you have quite a bit to do with the new book coming out, so I wanted to keep this short.” He looked at the stacks of books that surrounded her desk, idly he wondered how many of them she had written herself.

“I really only have one more thing to ask you Miss Singer. After reading everything that you sent me there is something I still don’t understand. Pardon my saying this but nothing in your past points to, well, your rather meteoric rise. In fact, and I assure you I mean absolutely nothing by this, you seem very average.” She smiled a tiny, little smile, the sort of expression people share when they find out that you’ve stumbled upon a private joke.

“Is that right Mr. Godfrey? I am average, you say?”

“Miss Singer I assure you I mean . . . Never mind, I am so sorry! What I really wanted to know is how do you think you got where you are today? What did you do that other writers who haven’t been as successful as yourself have failed to do?” He wanted to say, what’s your secret but he had already made a big enough fool of himself. As he looked at the woman, he noticed her wry smile never faltered.

“I wrote.”

He blinked once, hesitated and waiting for her to finish. She seemed to notice his discomfort, so after a few moments of heavy silence she continued, “You were right the first time. I am quite average. If anything, I only know one thing worth speaking of. There are about a million ways you can fail at anything in this world Mr. Godfrey. Many of them are completely out of your control and most you can’t predict even if you could control them. The reason I am famous right this moment is probably because my first publisher had a good lunch before reading my manuscript and decided to take a chance on a new author. The reason he saw that manuscript is because I sent it to him, after writing about 15 others, written for audiences consisting almost exclusively of my best friends, my dog Rodger and about fifty of New York’s finest publishing house’s waste paper bins. The reason any of those manuscripts existed at all is because I wrote them. Many writers fail at that simple thing. They don’t write.” She tapped the desk once, then twice and then looked towards her watch, “Speaking of writing Mr. Godfrey, I have a bit more of that to do before lunch. I hope you have everything you need.”

As William stood up, closed his notebook and clicked off his recorder, he was struck by the fact that he did.

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