Sublime

O’Connor’s “Good Country People,”

“No one wants to die,” said Becka. “But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”

In its early pages it said, “Once there was a lonely person.” It might have gone on to say, “And isn’t it wonderful? That lonely person met another lonely person and now neither is lonely.” By declining to go there, the story now begins asking a more profound question: “What if a lonely person can find no way out of her loneliness?” This is where,

he made his own living in his own way and never had to call any man master. He never enjoyed a stable income, and never had a completely reliable publishing outlet. Uncertain as to whether he was a novelist or not, he added to the richness of English fiction but learned to concentrate on the essay form. Thus, he faced the competing orthodoxies and

Which are you? he asked the silver squiggle. Dark dead yin or brilliant living yang?

Early in a story, I’ll have a few discrete blocks (blobs? swaths?) of loose, sloppy text. As I revise, those blocks will start to . . . ​get better. Soon, a block will start working—I can get all the way through it without a needle drop. The word that sometimes comes to mind is “undeniable,” as in “All right, this bit is pretty much undeniable,” wh