‘searing heat’ we are dealing with the deadest of wood, but no one would—if you’ll forgive this old triple-worder—bat an eyelid over ‘bitter’ or ‘cold’ in isolation. . . .”

An author must be love-flushed: you must give them the most comfortable chair; you want to give the reader the seat nearest the fire, the best wine and food. It’s a sort of hospitality gesture.

The king died, and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.”

a significance that the listener understands but the speaker or character does not; situational irony—when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect; and finally, “cosmic irony”—the disparity between what humans desire and what the world actually serves up—the whims of the gods.

The crucial point was not to hedge the dialogue with explanation, setting out motives or his characters’ thoughts. Green considered such authorial assistance overbearing, because in life we don’t know what people are like. Even so, if everyone obeyed his rule, fulsome explainers like George Eliot, James, Proust, Woolf, Philip Roth, and many others

This is direct or quoted speech (“‘Well, so what if you all know,’ he says to himself”), the notion of a character’s thought as a speech made to himself.

For most writers, it takes considerable hard work before they can extract what is most valuable from their life stories.

“Let each utterance gravitate towards ironic totality,” to quote Kierkegaard’s heavy-duty vocabulary. Coming halfway is just a metaphor, of course, suggesting a compromise, but I suggest you stretch readers even further—not until they’ve twanged but

time? Why should we care about them anyway? What would be the first thing they stopped doing if they found out they had six months to live? Would they start smoking again? Would they keep flossing?