Recently, a friend of mine was bemoaning the fact that her middle-school-age daughter had recently announced that she wanted to shop at Abercrombie and Fitch instead of Old Navy. She was bemoaning this shift because 1. Abercrombie and Fitch is over-priced and 2. The store is dark and cologne-stinky. We didn’t even get into the inappropriate ads with the super-sexy half-nude kids lounging all over each other. (I thought about putting one up with this article, but realized I didn’t want any of those pictures on my site, so I settled for the image above.)

Anyway, then I read this article, which points out that—for girls—A&F sizes only go up to 10, while most other stores go up to 16 or 18. That’s because A&F C.E.O. Mike Jeffries doesn’t want “overweight” girls wearing his clothes. Boys’ sizes go up to XXL, because you can be an athletic boy, and wear a large size. Athletic girls, apparently, are only allowed to be small. Mike Jeffries explains that this is a marketing strategy, “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” Oh, boy. I guess that Mike Jeffries’s idea of having a “great attitude” is pretty different from mine.

Needless to say, this article filled me with rage. A&F’s policies are completely sexist, for one thing. For another, do we really need entire brand lines reinforcing the idea that thin, rich kids are “cool,” and everyone else isn’t worthy enough to buy clothes? Another friend of mine reminded me that A&F had printed up an entire line of racist T-shirts in 2002, including one with two cartoon caricatures of Chinese “Wong Brothers,” who run a laundry. “Two Wongs Make It White!” reads the shirt. This is the stuff that Mike Jeffries thinks appeals to the “cool” kids. Sorry—what does “cool” mean? I think Mike Jeffries is using a dictionary from another planet.

In middle school, my friends and I called ourselves “the Out Crowd.” We were the funny kids, the smart kids, the creative kids. We called ourselves that even though we never felt like outcasts. It was more like a joke—we had plenty of friends. At the time, the cool brands were Guess and Izod. We might have worn some clothes from those brands, or we might not. We definitely didn’t measure worth by the clothes people wore, and we didn’t think much of people who did. I don’t believe that most kids today are any different.

Yesterday, I ran into my friend again. I started to tell her what I had recently discovered about A&F, and she stopped me. “I saw it,” she said. “And when I told me daughter about it, she said, ‘Well, we’re not shopping there anymore.’” I gave my friend a high five.

Mike Jeffries, that is a cool kid.

When I was in the sixth grade, my social studies teacher asked everyone in the class to draw a map of an imaginary country. We were learning about topography and maps in general, so he encouraged us to label our imaginary rivers, lakes, mountains, historically important sites, etc. He showed us how borders and shorelines are typically crinkly. He encouraged us to imagine whether our country was an island, a peninsula, or landlocked by neighbors. All of these considerations have an impact on the culture of the people who would live in our country.

For my map, I created a nation called Ookieland, which was inhabited by Ookies. I handed in my map and got an A. The difference between me and the rest of the class is that I did not stop drawing maps of imaginary countries. I drew map after map. I took inspiration from the maps in the Chronicles of Narnia, and as I drew my own, I imagined the people who would live in my countries. I imagined the warriors of the bitter north, the brave and fun-loving seafarers of the south, and the Ookies in the forest. And then I started to come up with stories about those people. As some of you know, I never quite let go of this project—Ookies make an appearance in my book, The Wizard, the Witch, and Two Girls from Jersey.

I recently stumbled across a map drawn by the Brontës when they were children. They would make up stories about their imaginary land—the same thing I used to do. Looking back on it now, that single assignment in sixth grade may have determined my entire career. I always thought I was a weird kid for sitting in my room and drawing all of those maps. Now I wish I still had one. I would frame it. It’s an important relic from my past, as important as my diploma.

Recently, my daughter suffered a sudden, unexpected health problem. My husband and I raced out of the house in the dark to the nearby hospital, where doctors and nurses descended on her in the kind of scene that is every parent’s worst nightmare. When she had recovered enough, we were transferred to the bigger hospital twenty minutes away and given a room in the children’s ward. It’s a bright, colorful place where the staff go to enormous trouble to make sure that the children are comfortable and well taken care of.

I am one of the few people in the world who likes hospitals. I find them reassuring, with their mysterious machinery and people who know amazing things about the body and how it functions. We were there for two days, and in those uncertain hours, a parade of nurses and doctors came in to examine my daughter. As I sat beside her, I wished that I were one of them. A sign at the end of the hall read, “What have you done today to help a child?” I found that sign haunting. Why did I choose to be a writer? I wondered. Why didn’t I go into the medical field? Why couldn’t I pick a career that’s useful? Why don’t I have any skills? 

That night, I lay on the hospital bed with my daughter while my husband took the fold-out chair beside us. Beyond our door, the nurses’ station hummed with quiet activity. A baby in the room beside ours wailed. The doctors were sure that my daughter would be fine, but she was scheduled for tests the next day. “Mama,” my daughter said in the semi-darkness, “I’m feeling sad. Would you tell me a story?”

That question was the answer I needed to hear. In addition to all of the tests, medicine, and knowledge, what my daughter needed was a story. Because, after all, our spirits need care as much as our bodies do. I do have skills, I realized. My career is useful.

And so of course I told her a story. I am a storyteller, after all. I think I found it even more comforting than she did.

The question I am asked most—that every writer is asked most—is “Where do your ideas come from?” I have tried to answer this question before here. But, for some reason, when I received this question in my E-mailbox last week, I started to think about it again. It’s a frustrating question, not because it is a bad one, or an obvious one, but because it is such an essential one, and I’m not even sure that I know the answer.

I wish that I could tell you that they come when I’m relaxed, or when I’m happy, or when I’m concentrating hard, but the truth is that they often come at the most inconvenient times—when I’m driving, or showering, or cooking. In her fabulous TED talk about inspiration, Elizabeth Gilbert tells a wonderful story about Lou Reed. I’m paraphrasing, but one day, while he was driving along, Lou Reed caught a piece of a beautiful melody. He desperately wanted to hold onto it, and was furious that it had come to him at such a lousy moment. So he told it, “Can’t you see I’m driving? Go bother Leonard Cohen.” In ancient Greece, Archimedes struggled with the problem of how to be sure whether or not a crown was made of solid gold without melting or altering it. He realized the answer while stepping in the bathtub, and ran through the streets shouting, “Eureka!” People say that stepping into the bath gave him the idea of buoyancy as it relates to volume. But millions of people have stepped into millions of baths before and since, and only Archimedes thought of the solution to the problem of determining volume. So—where did that idea really come from? Where did Lou Reed’s idea come from?

I don’t know for sure. I know only that the world is speaking to us. We are surrounded by ideas and solutions—we have only to think of them. We must also be ready for them. When Lou Reed was not ready to hear the melody, he had to let it go. But a musician is always listening to the world—he trusted that a new melody would appear. Archimedes was searching for the answer to a problem, and when the world showed him something, his mind was ready to see the meaning. Writers need to have questions, the willingness to hear the answers, and faith that the ideas are out there. They will come to you.

Just hopefully not while you’re driving.