And beyond those relatively simple facts, you have a sense of my sensibility. My emotional makeup, my responses to the world, my obdurate willingness to revise and revise again. What I notice, what I pay attention to. That—not only that, but essentially that; in addition to fact, sometimes instead of fact—is at the heart of fiction.

I could have written anything there, shaped those glimpses however I wanted, and you wouldn’t know. You know far more about me from what I’ve been writing about throughout these pages, and how I’ve been writing about it.

Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, who used that phrase as the title for his own study of Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and others, wrote that: The energy of delusion—the energy of searching freely—never left Tolstoy. In his conception of War and Peace he begins writing about Kutuzov. He comes up with a flawed sketch of the character, even though

Even once I started writing, I kept failing. I wrote bad prose poems, laughable villanelles, ridiculous sestinas. I wrote part of a play featuring Franciscan monks arguing about a schism in their order, and something like a story about the Inquisition. I wrote multiple drafts of two terrible novels, later discarded. Again and again, as I’ve touched

Those experiments seemed to last forever: would I be this kind of person, or that? Live this way? Or that? Each friendship felt at the time like the one true one, the entry into the life I was meant to live. Each time I failed to understand the lives of my friends and their families. Nor did I grasp my effect (pernicious, for the most part) on

All my life I’ve thought that with hard and diligent work, a person could master almost anything. I had little sense (who wants to acknowledge this?) of how essential chaos is, how great a role serendipity, intuition, and timing play. How much waste is essential.

A fictional narrative adds to those tools the attitudes of its characters toward themselves and each other—conveyed by speech, but also in thought, since we can enter the minds of our characters (even our “real” characters). The rapture of firsthand encounters with another’s lived experience—that, with all that implies, makes possible the crucial

dated July 6, 1860; had he written it then? “There is a strange commingling of life-forms in the Straits of Belle Isle,” the text continued.

That’s what I can feel unconsciously, intuitively, when tunneling through a mass of material: whose point of view, whose feelings registering the event will prove most fruitful for the story? At one level, I’m searching for an intriguing set of events or a shapely narrative movement. But on another, what I’m feeling my way toward is the right