What would YOU write?

I 've started listening to audio books in the car. It's half an hour from my home to the library and I thought this would be a smart way to get ahead at reviewing materials for our YA collection. (After all, I can only read so fast, and there are so many books, you wouldn't even believe.)

I thought I would skim the books, skipping chapters, listening just enough to get a feel for the quality of the writing, the general plot, the moral (if there is one) and the ending --in other words, the stuff a librarian would need to know in order to decide whether a book is 'good' for kids to read. A great time-saver, I thought.

So now I'm in the midst of Inkspell, which I am listening to only because I simply had to know what happened after Inkheart, which I listened to last month. (You can see how this is not working out so well as a time-saving tool. 13 hours of listening to Lynn Redgrave read me the first book was more than enough to determine that Cornelia Funke is an author well worth reading. And I haven't skipped a single word, never mind an entire chapter.)

Today I got to the part where Meggie and Farid find Fenoglio in the Inkworld after Meggie has read the two of them there so that they can warn Dustfinger about Basta.

I was relieved that there seems to be a way for Meggie to get home (assuming of course that Fenoglio can find write the right words), but more than that, I found myself shaking my head in wonderment at the scope of this story and the patience of its teller. When you think about it, she has done much more than Fenoglio, for she has created two worlds for her readers. Amazing, really.

Can you imagine what it would be like to start with a blank sheet of paper and have it turn out to be a book read by millions? Where does that first idea come from?

And wouldn't it be a grand and glorious thing to give the world a story that lasts forever?

But I am not a writer, and over the years I have managed to make my peace with this, telling myself that readers play just as important a role. After all, what value is the story if it never gets read?

Of course I've never asked Cornelia Funke, but I imagine the reason she has such patience for telling Meggie's story is that it's precisely the sort of story she would most like to be told -- a story so rich and full of detail that it's hard to believe it's not real.

This got me thinking about what kind of story I would write --I mean, if I ever could. What type of story do I like most to hear? Coming at it from that direction, maybe I could write something someday. Who knows? Anything's possible, right?

And then, not surprisingly, all of this thinking about stories led me to wondering about you.

If you could give the world just one story to last forever, what would YOU write?