“It won’t be like that,” he said, “not if you do it right. The object is to write something every day about something that happened to you, even if it’s only a couple of paragraphs. Think of it as telling your life story, just a little bit at a time. If you want to write about what happened with your basketball team, write about that. Again, it doesn’t have to be long. I can see already this will be a good exercise for you. Someday, when you’re as old as me, you won’t believe how lucky you’ll feel that you can go back and see what was happening to you when you were twelve.”

“You mean like looking at an old picture?” Lucas said.

He thought of the photographs of his dad, and wished they came with a story.

“It will be way better than that,” Mr. Collins said. “It shouldn’t feel like a job. You could try to do it every day, but it’s not like the stars will fall out of the heavens if you miss a day. The big thing is to keep the story going.”

Lucas started writing about basketball after the Wolves’ first practice, showing the journal to Mr. Collins every few days. He was already getting a sense of what was his best work and what wasn’t. Mostly what he got from Mr. Collins, who was a basketball fan himself, was encouragement. The work, he said, was paying off. Lucas was a better writer by November than he’d been when the school year started.

It was also way more fun than Lucas thought it was going to be. The first few days were a bit of a grind, trying to decide what was worth writing about. After a while, though, it started to click. Sometimes he’d write everything down as soon as he got home, as a way of making sure not to forget the things he did want to write about that day. Sometimes he’d have to wait until after he did his real homework. He made sure to never let the journal get in the way of his other schoolwork. Lucas prided himself on getting good grades, even in the classes he didn’t love as much as English. Sometimes he’d even miss some of a basketball game he was planning to watch on television because he wanted to get upstairs and write. He didn’t want to miss a day.

Sometimes he’d describe a good play he’d made, like the pass to Ryan to end the practice game. Sometimes he’d write down one of Gramps’s sayings, or some story Mrs. Moretti had told about her career, since Gramps never talked very much about his own.

When Lucas would try to get something out of him, Gramps would always say pretty much the same thing.