A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo

What we’re really asking is: What might happen (what needs to happen) over the remaining seven paragraphs to elevate this into a story?

So, her mind returns easily and naturally to the school, and we might now recall that this is just what it did after Semyon’s assassination anecdote, earlier. She’s twice now retreated from the world to thoughts of the school (and we’re that much more sensitized to future occurrences). Why does she do this? What does this tell us about her that we

Our evolving, rather hard-ass model of a story says that every part of it should be there for a reason. The merely incidental (“this really happened” or “this was pretty cool” or “this got into the story and I couldn’t quite take it out again”) won’t cut it. Every part of the story should be able to withstand this level of scrutiny,

nor this marvelous, immeasurably deep sky, into which it seemed that one would plunge with such joy, offered anything new and interesting to Marya Vasilyevna,

So we might understand revision as a way of practicing relationship; seeing what, when we do it, improves the relationship between ourselves and the reader. What makes it more intense, direct, and honest?

This is an important storytelling move we might call “ritual banality avoidance.” If we deny ourselves the crappo version of our story, a better version will (we aspirationally assume) present itself. To refuse to do the crappo thing is to strike a de facto blow for quality. (If nothing else, at least we haven’t done that.)

once heard the great Chicago writer Stuart Dybek say, “A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.” Revising like this is a way of listening to the story and of having faith in it: it wants to be its best self, and if you’re patient with it, in time, it will be. Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iterati

The boldness of this leap teaches us something important about the short story: it is not a documentary or rigorous accounting of the passage of time or a fair-minded attempt to show life as it is really lived; it’s a radically shaped, even somewhat cartoonish (when held up against the tedious real world) little machine that thrills us with the ext

The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way.