WHAT YOU NEED

My childhood predates most of the things Americans consider to be the bedrock of modern society: smartphones, cable television, easy access to burritos. Back in my day we didn't have fancy things for entertainment — or fancy burritos driven right to your front door by some guy responding to an order you transmitted via app — and so I spent a lot of my time pretending. My brother, Yan, and I entertained ourselves with world-building, usually with a liberal mix of Legos, plastic army men, and aluminum foil shaped into horrific metallic Godzillas. We invaded every room of the house, spinning an infinite yarn of galactic wars, monster-plagued cities, and the brave, doomed paratroopers caught in the branches of the dying Christmas tree and abandoned by their squad.

When my brother was otherwise occupied, I entertained myself with some more good old-fashioned pretending. I would be a drug-addled rock star, using an old tennis racket as a guitar and telling imaginary band mates on stage that I was breaking up the band and going solo. Or I'd be a world-famous brain surgeon, about to operate on the president just as I notice a twitch in my right hand. In between marathon sessions playing Donkey Kong and reading, I was a lot of things in the privacy of my room. When I got bored with pretending to be a glamorous, highly paid professional, one day I decided to slum it a little and pretend to be a famous writer. So I stole my mother's typewriter.

T.S. Eliot once said that "good writers borrow, but great writers steal." While it's usually understood that Eliot meant "steal" in terms of creativity, trust me when I tell you that when most writers realize how much money they can actually earn from their writing, other definitions of the word steal come to mind.

I didn't intend to steal my mother's typewriter. I was pretending to be an alcoholic, unhappy novelist, and I needed a prop, so I borrowed it — and then I just never gave it back. Here we are forty years later, and I still have it, so I can only assume my mother didn't need to type anything aft er 1981 or so, which explains a great many things regarding the fact that I don't recall going to school in the 1980s. Or to the doctor.

But I digress. I can't pinpoint the precise moment when I segued from pretending to be a writer to actually writing, but that decision can be laid at the feet of several people, including my old pals C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, because I very much wished there were more Narnia and Lord of the Rings novels (so why not write my own!), and Piers Anthony, whose generous Author's Notes at the end of his books demystified novel writing to the point where a snotty ten-year-old kid like me imagined it was easy peasy. And it was, kinda; I wrote my first novel in a few weeks on that typewriter. It was thirty pages long; it was essentially The Fellowship of the Ring, if that novel had been thirty pages long and written in a form of English that didn't require any sort of punctuation.

My only point is simple: At the age of ten, having committed some slight slow-motion larceny in the acquisition of a typewriter, I had the only two things you will ever need to write a novel: a functioning brain and something to write with.

OR, IN MY CASE, A HALF-FUNCTIONING BRAIN

The fact is, writing is one of those creative endeavors that requires almost nothing beyond your creative energy — you don't need collaborators, special equipment, specific training, or special access to anything in order to write a novel. Or, frankly, to publish one. Other creative vocations make it impossible to engage professionally without at least some of those things. Look at the music business: You need years of training (even if you are self-taught), an instrument (oft en expensive), and equipment, even if we're just talking about a computer with recording soft ware on it and a Bandcamp (https://bandcamp.com) account. You can whittle those requirements down to the bare bones, but it's still more complicated than writing a novel, which really does require nothing more than your imagination and something to write with, even if just a pencil and paper.

And yet, based on the questions I get all the time, people seem to think that writing a novel is a complicated, arduous task that requires not only the right implements, but also the right work space, training, relationships, and lifestyle. Part of this is the fault of film and television that have fetishized writing, in a way; they present writers working like Colin Firth in Love Actually, jetting off to an idyllic cottage in France to wear ridiculous sweaters and sit by a gorgeous pond, writing on a manual typewriter while sipping delicious teas, his attractive domestic silently falling in love with him.

Part of it is the fault of aspiring writers themselves. You might have heard F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous line about how all Americans imagine they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires; well, all writers imagine they are temporarily embarrassed bestsellers, and we're all vaguely embarrassed at how not arduous writing actually is. I mean, we sit behind a desk and make things up. Sometimes we have to get up before noon and go to the library or ask someone a few questions. It's not literally difficult to write a book, not in the physical sense. So we like to dress it...