I had an informal conversation the other day with someone who has been mulling over a children’s story since…well since before Nixon was impeached oh so many impeachments ago. It did not take long to realize that this person was no longer mulling; over five decades the mulling had descended into dodging and shirking and other forms of evasion that masked an unwillingness to try.

Fifty years of gestation..no pregnant woman I know would tolerate that. (Yep, my forty-ninth year—just can’t seem to push that sucker out.)

But it was a frustrating conversation, for both of us probably. I kept wondering what the writer was waiting for, and the writer was lamenting the years of inaction. Eventually we both figured out the truth: the writer was a writer the same way I’m an airline pilot—it’s a nice fantasy, but it’s not happening.

Of course part of the problem here is that writing is hard. We can all fool ourselves and claim we never had the time, or there’s no ribbon in our typewriters, or the ink in our inkwells has dried up—every generation can produce its own justification. But writing demands more than excuses. It’s hard.

But imagine all the authors who would not have been authors if they’d felt that same lack of initiative;

Jane Austen of Pride and Prejudice fame—was dead at 41;

Charlotte Brontë died during pregnancy when she was 38;

On New Year’s Eve when you’re singing Auld Lang Syne, remember Robert Burns, dead at 37;

Much of our understanding of and insight into the Civil War comes by way of The Red Badge of Courage. Its author, Stephen Crane, lived only to see his 29th birthday;

“Lawrence of Arabia,” T./ E. Lawrence, died of injures sustained in a motorcycle accident. He was 46;

The most gifted Japanese writer of the 20th century, Yukio Mishima, committed ritual suicide at 45;

Henry David Thoreau, was one of countless tuberculosis victims, dead at 44.

Then there’d be library shelves bereft of The Great Gatsby, The Plague, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Look Homeward, Angel, et al. Not one of these works would have existed because their authors never celebrated a fiftieth birthday.

So get on with it. I mean, thank you for reading this—I appreciate it—now stop reading this and write something. Stop telling people about the idea you have for a book and get some words down on paper. Our life expectancy in 2019 certainly outstrips that of a hundred, two hundred years ago, but there are no guarantees and the clock ticks at the same pace.

Better get started.

Is it better to tell an old story in a new way, or do we need new stories every time we write?

I mean what was the Great Gatsby but the story of money being unable to buy happiness? We all know that’s true.

What was the Moby Dick other than the story of obsession? Obsession—bad.

The Red Badge of Courage? War is bad also—very bad.

The Naked and the Dead? War is worse than even the Red Badge of Courage said it was.

So then, should telling old stories in the best possible way be the goal of the modern fiction writer? My definitive answer, after much thought and consideration is—I don’t know.

There are days when I’ll look at a morning’s writing and say, wow, that’s pretty good. Nothing shocking but very readable—and I walk away feeling proud. But there are other mornings when I’ll look at the same amount of work, again nothing shocking, and say “that’s been done a thousand times..today alone…and better.” Delete, start again.

Despite my own indecisiveness, I do believe there’s nothing new under the sun, or very little that’s new. It then becomes incumbent upon the writer—whether he is producing fiction or non-fiction, novels or essays, to convey what he wants for his reader in the best possible way for that particular genre. There is no blanket prescription.

That’s twice I’ve copped out, so let me explain. There are chapters in Moby Dick that are virtual how-to manuals for running a whaling ship. In Gatsby though, mystery surrounds the main character, and even if we wanted to use James Gatz as a role model, we wouldn’t know how.

We need to adapt a good deal when we tell a story—to be able to pull back before the reader says “get on with it” and be able to satisfy the reader who wants more. The more good literature we read, the better our chances of effecting that skill.

Near the end of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter the narrator implores his reader to be true, be true, be true: such a simple philosophy may be the best advice for a writer also. Tell the truth…but if you can utter that truth in some new and imaginative way, all the better.

There is much to be gleaned from the final episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones, but the speech of the dwarf Tyrion Lannister resonates more than any other words or deeds. In a sense he was telling us why we watched the show and why it was important to watch it, irrespective of the magnitude and spectacle.

Tyrion, still grieving over the death of his brother, stood above the ashes of a slaughtered city with a death sentence on his head and the self-knowledge that he had been wrong about so many things, and delivered what was, in fact, the message of every writer:

“What unites people?” he asks the representatives gathered to decide his fate. “Armies? Gold? Flags?”

And he pauses, because he knows it is none of those, then continues.

“Stories,” he says. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.”

We all have them—stories, that is. And if they don’t rise to the level of deciding the fates of millions, they at least give life to ourselves, our forebears, our descendants.

Game of Thrones took on a life of its own as vast as the battles it comprised, and today people are arguing over the validity of its ending. Some are angry, others are disappointed, but me? I’m grateful for having been given the role of observer in a narrative of such scope. Someday when the specifics of the families have faded, when we vaguely remember Starks and Lannisters and wonder aloud weren’t there dragons too?—then the story—and the fact that there was a story—will still unite us.

And to those who who complain that the series did not end the way they wanted it to, spoiler alert: life is like that also.