When I visit classrooms — the last one of the current school year was this past week in Howell, New Jersey — I often find myself responding to the question, “Do you like being an author?” with two statements.

The first is that the word “author” seems too grand a word for what I do and appears to signify something greater than “writer,” which to me is more accurate and a bit humbler. The second response is in the nature of an emphatic “YES!” that it is quite intoxicating (not the word I use in classrooms) to go through life with all your senses open to what is happening, to all the ideas that are in the world for us to encounter and internalize. Imagine, I say, that the top of your head is open and everything is constantly going into it, as if there were a bowl on your head, and the world was always filling it up.

Which may be true for all writers, but seems especially useful to very young writers who haven’t yet learned to tap into the endless stream of ideas. So it was a treat to watch a late interview with John Updike in which he answers an audience question about where he gets the ideas for his short stories. After acknowledging that an idea might come from “something that happens to you,” Updike suggested that as a writer he finds himself in a position to address this or that topic as it interests him. An idea might come from “a news item. Dostoevsky read the newspaper and would then write on [what he found there]. . . . If you’re a practicing writer, you’re open to new ideas wherever they may occur.”

This reminds me of a friend of mine who, having written several novels on autobiographical topics, wrote a moving and quite successful book whose idea originated not with her but with her editor. This happens all the time, of course, but is another example of having that bowl on your head ready and waiting for what happens, always being “open to new ideas,” as Updike puts it.