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

The person that emerges is complex and three-dimensional. We wonder about him, rather than having him neatly in our pocket, and we’re not sure if we want Marya interested in him or not.

A short story is not just a series of events, one following after another. It’s not a lively narrative that briskly continues for a number of pages, then stops. It’s a narrative that compels us to finish reading it, yes, but that, in the midst of itself, somehow rises or expands and becomes . . . ​ enough. When I was a kid, Lipton had a TV commerci

I’ll sometimes ask the workshop to come up with what I call the “Hollywood version” of the story—a pithy one- or two-sentence summary. It’s no good to start making suggestions about a story until we’ve agreed on what it’s trying to do. (If a complicated machine showed up in your yard, you wouldn’t start altering it and “improving” it until you had

For a story to ask these sorts of questions, we first have to finish it. It has to draw us in, compel us to keep going.

What makes you you, as a writer, is what you do to any old text, by way of this iterative method. This method overturns the tyranny of the first draft. Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it. You don’t need an idea to start a story. You just need a sentence. Where does that senten

In other words, what makes us think of Tolstoy as a moral-ethical giant here is a technique (going from mind to mind) coupled with a confidence. Of what is Tolstoy confident? That people are more similar to him than different. That he has an inner Vasili, an inner aged host, an inner Petrushka, an inner Nikita. This confidence serves as a gateway t

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

What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done.

Where might the story go from here? Scan your mind, make a list. Which of your ideas feel too obvious? That is to say: Which, if Chekhov enacts them, will disappoint you by responding too slavishly to your expectations? (Hanov, on the next page, drops to one knee and proposes.) Which, too random, won’t be responding to your expectations at all? (A

Suddenly, the potential for fiction as a vital force in the world felt unlimited. It could be everything: the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication ever devised, a powerful form of entertainment, in the highest sense of that word. I suppose part of me had been wondering if the short story was going to be enough—enough for my grandiose a