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.

We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy. Marya was created unhappy and lonely and has become more specifically unhappy and lonely with every passing page. That is the energy the story has made, and must use. There’s

We have to become whatever writer is capable of producing the necessary level of energy. (“The writer can choose what he writes about,” said Flannery O’Connor, “but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”)

I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t. First, a willingness to revise. Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.

As a particular person gets made, the potential for meaningful action increases.

starts out small and devoid of intention and begins to expand, organically, reacting to itself, fulfilling its own natural energy.

Nikita had nothing to do, and as usual in such circumstances he drowsed, making up for much sleepless time.

A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It’s nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up.

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