1. It has been ten years since a writer of books has won the Nobel prize for literature. It’s pretty weird for a debut collection of stories, but guess who wins? It’s you.
2. You will live in a cave in the woods, grow a long beard, write on bark. A crow will deliver your work to the bigwigs in NYC. You will never be sure if they love you for your writing or your legend.
3. You will open a bakery. You will write on cakes. Everything you write will be delicious; your work will be longed for and devoured. Fast forward a decade, though; the Supreme Court agrees with you that cake writing is art but it’s only because they want to make it legal to deny stuff to gay people. Now your beautiful cakes are subsumed by bigots.
4. You will have a gifted child. Your child will speak in her sleep what you always wanted to write. You will record what she says and save it for her to submit to literary magazines on her sixteenth birthday. But by then she’ll think it’s stupid and she won’t let you.
5. You will move back in with your parents. You’ll think it’s going to suck, but turns out everyone loves and respects you so much you don’t feel a need to write anymore anyway.
6. Don’t worry, your first book will be awesome, but no one will understand it. It’ll be because you are ahead of your time. That’s great, right?
7. You’ll get bonked on the head with an anvil. You’ll become like that guy in Memento. You’ll keep writing, of course, one sentence at a time — the best way — and actually, everyone will love your book, but you won’t remember writing it, and after a while people will get sick of explaining to you how great you are.
8. You will meet a tall dark stranger. Your writing future remains shrouded in mystery.