Have you ever been reading a good story and a character will have a moving insight that says something you weren’t sure how to say yourself, but bam, there it is? Well, look in the mirror. Because whether you knew it or not, the author pulled it from you.

An author’s earliest work usually starts with her own reflection in the mirror. Over time, over the telling of stories, that mirror becomes a window, to connect to the emotions of others, to give the author’s insights a broader scope and deeper characters. That’s where the story “takes off” and tells itself, because the more the author lets go of the “I” in the work, the farther and deeper it can go.

In college, I was with someone for two years. It was the longest relationship I’d had up until then. We were both emotional messes. But in the long run, it was him who realized we had to break up. Love is fake. That’s the cynic’s viewpoint, right? Just a chemical reaction. It would actually be far less painful if it was. I could not give up on the relationship because I lacked any ability to do so, no matter how unhappy I became. So he broke it off, because he couldn’t stand how miserable I was any longer. Because he cared about me. Loved me.

Why does love succeed? Why does it fail? Or rather, why do we fail to live up to our hopes for it? The deeper an author writes emotionally, the more we’re trying to answer universal questions like that, to see the path through, or how to keep on the path.

Maybe when we don’t have hard questions left to answer about love is when we stop writing about it. When I meet an author who writes love stories who stopped writing for that reason, I’ll let you know.

We like to talk about the elements of writing, what drives it, the ideas that spark a story, but for the long game, there are things that drive it that reflect your struggle to live your best life—whatever that means—and to understand everything about life you can. That thought takes me back to one truth, an element in almost every great success story. Those who succeed, show up. And love (as well as writing – aren’t they the same thing, lol?) is all about showing up, through good, bad, apathy, disappointment, pain, numbness, etc.

And when you dig deep enough, you get this (from the amazing book Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid):

It was such a rush, singing like that. Singing a song that I felt in my heart. I watched the people at the front of the crowd listening to me, hearing me. These people from a different country, people I’d never met in my life, I felt connected to them in a way that I hadn’t felt connected to anyone.

It is what I have always loved about music. Not the sounds or the crowds or the good times as much as the words—the emotions, and the stories, the truth—that you can let flow right out of your mouth.

Music can dig, you know? It can take a shovel to your chest and just start digging until it hits something.

The more I’ve read, seen, heard, felt and learned, the more I’ve realized stillness, quiet, is the answer to most things. To finding the answers. Listening, maybe occasionally asking the right questions, or the questions that come to you when it’s time, but mostly it’s being quiet, as witness.

There’s very little you can stop or change in people’s actions at the moment in time they’re saying or doing it, but what’s carried forward, that’s when something may or may not happen—when you see the story take shape and go where you wistfully hope it can. Where the mirror reverses and the story’s happily-ever-after can reflect life, because the kernel of it was THERE in real life all along.

Because that’s where the author found it.