L showed up smiling shyly. She set her phone, tablet and two different notebooks onto the table, and after a chatty lunch, we got to business. Everybody should know never to get between two writers who are talking about the art and craft of the thing. We can go on for hours. At one point, my daughter – who is a painter, not a writer — went to the bakery for bread, and since L and I were still talking when she got back, she went into the kitchen to bake brookies.

Here’s how I knew L was a born author.

She watches the world. L showed me some of the short story/essays she wrote about people in her school or situations there. In one, a classroom with white ceiling lights was transformed by one single pink light bulb that mysteriously appeared overnight. This was true, it really happened, and the story was a fun way to interpret that little change in her daily life. That’s the basic building block of stories. Change.

She loves people. L has lived in several countries, speaks different languages, and generally has had a lot of experience with many different people at a young age. She writes short stories about individual friends and then reads them out loud as a gift. That’s amazing! A story about my daughter is what made her tell me about L to begin with. It was clever and sweet and full of warmth.

She reads. I keep hearing fewer and fewer young people have the attention span to read an entire book. This is hard to believe, mostly because that’s not true of the teenagers in my house. But then, they’re surrounded by books and have a writer mother. They have no choice. Everyone consumes stories in some form, but writers have to read if they want to soak up how the written word is manipulated to produce certain effects (tension, emotion, etc). There’s really no substitute for that. No how-to book will help someone become a writer if they don’t also love to read.

She has a voice. We tell stories for lots of reasons, but if we stick to it, or don’t let ourselves be flattened by writing advice, we each write in our own particular way. After reading a couple of L’s pieces, I immediately saw the similarities, the unique voice of L. I told her to never, ever lose it. In the age of AI, all we have is our individual human voice, our personal stamp that is unlike any other.

She writes. This is the point that really matters. There’s a lot of discussion on social media now and then on what makes a “real” writer, and it’s always silly. A writer writes. It doesn’t matter why they write or how much or for whom or if it’s published. A writer writes. When I was in high school, I wrote stories in tiny letters along the edges of my notebook paper while I listened to boring lectures. L writes on her tablet (though she hates that and wants a laptop). Our age didn’t matter. A writer writes.

She wants to write. It’s well known that writing is hard and not always fun. Sometimes you do it because you feel compelled or it’s your job or you feel wonky if you don’t. Whatever the compulsion to write, the only cure is to write. Not to input keywords into AI and then edit what it spits out. That’s not writing, that is copy editing. Writing comes from the desire to tell a story, and that’s something writers can only get better at if they do it themselves. They have to want to do the work.

She has a bit of a notebook and/or pen fetish. When I offered L one of my blank notebooks as a gift, her eyes lit up as any writer’s would. I write in notebooks all the time, pretty ones that I find discounted (usually at TK Maxx) and then collect in a stack ready to use when I need them. I spend a lot of time picking out which notebooks I like. It has to fit in my purse, feel good in my hand, have thick enough paper, not too glaring color and so on. I only write with one kind of pen: A blue ink Schneider Slider Rave XB viscoglide, made in Germany. We buy boxes of those pens wholesale so I always have a few wherever I am. I could write with any old pen on any old paper, but that would just feel weird. And for the record, I only scribble notes in these books. I write my novels on computer.

It was a lot of fun to chat with a young author. It didn’t matter how many decades and how much experience separated L and me. We talked as writers, as lovers of the written word (and books! and paper! and pens!), and that matters more than anything else.