This was to be his first act as a writer.

It needn’t be memorable, there was no requirement that this piece of writing endure beyond the moment. Outside his window, the wind tossed the leaves on the bigleaf maple tree like one giant wet piece of cloth. “Those leaves are big,” he thought. They hung still for a moment and he suddenly realized that he hadn’t noticed them growing. Here it was, June already, barely June, a cold June, a wet June; the year was slipping along, trotting forward without a pause and he wasn’t paying attention. He struggled to remember—when had he looked out at that tree last? Were the leaves even there? Now they were as big across as his chest.

“Big.”

Having a narrow chest doesn’t make you a writer. Hemingway had a chest like the trunk of an old oak. Didn’t he? A vigorous man, mortar fragments in his leg. He would have been able to come up with a better word than “big” for those leaves.

“Time to begin,” he thought. “Give up or write; don’t just look out the window.”