Over the last two centuries, society has experienced the increasing professionalization of authorship through agenting, marketing, and the takeover of the publishing industry by corporations not primarily concerned with literature. Film, television, and the internet have all had roles in promoting fame and fortune—or rather, celebrity and money—as the proper goals of authorship. At the same time and at the same pace, the respect with which society regards literature has declined.

In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari points out that it is not language itself but the related capacity to imagine what is not immediately present that distinguishes the human species. To imagine what is not immediately present allows us spirituality, nationhood, commerce, and law, and it is of course the essence of story.

But credibility in words has almost nothing to do with fact. Aristotle went so far as to say that a "probable impossibility" makes a better story than an "improbable possibility," meaning that a skillful author can sell us glass mountains, UFOs, and hobbits, while a less skilled writer may not be able to convince us that Mary Lou has a crush on Sam.

A related device for your journal might be borrowed from the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon. A courtesan in tenth-century Japan, she kept a diary of the goings-on at court and concealed it in her wooden pillow—hence its name. Sei Shōnagon made lists, inventories of things fitting specific, often quirky categories. This device is capable of endless variety and can reveal yourself to you as you find out what sort of things you want to list: Things I wish had never been said. Red things. Things more embarrassing than nudity. Things to put off as long as possible. Things to die for. Acid things. Things that last only a day.

It is so much easier to know what we ought to think and feel than what we actually do. Worthy authorities constantly exhort us to care about worthy causes, only a few of which really touch us, whereas what we do care about at any given moment may seem trivial, egotistical, or self-serving.

Perhaps influenced by the philosophy (although it was not always the practice) of the Beat authors, some new writers feel that "forcing" words is aesthetically false—and yet few readers can tell which story "flowed" from the writer's pen and which was set down one hard-won word at a time. Toni Morrison has said that she will frequently rewrite a passage eight times, simply to create the impression of an unbroken, inspired flow.

Many writers have observed that it is ideal, having turned your story over in your mind, to write the first draft at one sitting, pushing on through the action to the conclusion, no matter how dissatisfied you are with this paragraph, that character, this phrasing, or that incident. There are two advantages to doing this. The first is that you are more likely to produce a coherent draft when you come to the desk in a single frame of mind, with a single vision of the whole, than when you write piecemeal, with altered ideas and moods. The second is that fast writing tends to make for fast pace in the story. It is always easier, later, to add and develop than it is to sharpen the pace.

Writer's block is not so popular as it used to be. I suspect people got tired of hearing or even talking about it—sometimes writers can be sensitive even to their own clichés. But it may also be that writers began to understand and accept their difficulties. Sometimes the process seems to require working yourself into a muddle and past the muddle to despair; until you have done this, it may be impossible suddenly to see what the shape of a thing ought to be. When you're writing, this feels terrible. You sit spinning your wheels, digging deeper and deeper into the mental muck. You decide you are going to trash the whole thing and walk away from it—only you can't, and you keep coming back to it like a tongue to an aching tooth. Or you decide you are going to sit there until you bludgeon it into shape—and as long as you sit there it remains recalcitrant. W. H. Auden observed that the hardest part of writing is not knowing whether you are procrastinating or must wait for the words to come.

I know a newspaper editor who says that writer's block always represents a lack of information. I thought this inapplicable to fiction until I noticed that I was mainly frustrated when I didn't know enough about my characters, the scene, or the action—when I had not gone to the imaginative depth where information lies.

Encouragement comes from the poet William Stafford, who advised his students always to write to their lowest standard. Somebody always corrected him: "You mean your highest standard." No, he meant your lowest standard. Jean Cocteau's editor gave him the same advice: "The thought of having to produce a masterpiece is giving you writer's cramp. You're paralysed at the sight of a blank sheet of paper. So begin any old way. Write: 'One winter evening . . .'" In On Writer's Block: A New Approach to Creativity, Victoria Nelson points out that "there is an almost mathematical ratio between soaring, grandiose ambition . . . and a severe creative block." More writers prostitute themselves "up" than "down"; more are false in their determination to write great literature than in their willingness to throw off a romance.

The first is that the writer must deal in sense detail. The second is that these must be details “that matter.” As a writer of fiction you are at constant pains not simply to say what you mean, but to mean more than you say. Much of what you mean will be an abstraction or a judgment—love requires trust, children can be cruel. But if you write in abstractions or judgments, you are writing an essay, whereas if you let us use our senses and form our own interpretations, we will be involved as participants in a real way. Much of the pleasure of reading comes from the egotistical sense that we are clever enough to understand. When the author explains to us or interprets for us, we suspect that he or she doesn’t think us bright enough to do it for ourselves.

A detail can also matter if it suggests a change in character or a development in the plot. Chekhov famously said that if a pistol is placed on a mantel in the first act, it must go off in the last.

But to evoke those feelings, it is often necessary to portray sensory details that the reader may have experienced. Simply labeling a character’s emotion as love or hatred will have little effect, for such abstraction operates on a vague, intellectual level, whereas emotion is the body’s physical reaction to information the senses receive. The great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, originator of realistic “Method” acting, urged his students to abandon the grand emotive postures of the nineteenth-century stage in favor of emotions evoked by the actor’s recollection of sensory details connected with a personal past trauma. By recalling such details as the tingling of fingertips, the smell of singed hair, and the tensing of calf muscles, an emotion such as anger might naturally be induced within the actor’s body.

Yet neurobiologists assure us that this is what emotion is: a sensory response within the body to sensory input from the outside world, often in the presence of a basic need—food, sex, fight-or-flight. Unfortunately we are completely untrained in specifying these bodily reactions, and there are far too few ways of saying them. The Hawaiians may have seventy words for “pink,” but when the doctor asks us to describe a pain, it’s on a scale of one to ten, sharp or ache or throbbing?

Human character is in the foreground of all fiction, however the humanity might be disguised. Attributing human characteristics to the natural world may be frowned on in science, but it is a literary necessity. Bugs Bunny isn't a rabbit; he's a plucky youth in ears. Peter Rabbit is a mischievous boy. Brer Rabbit is a sassy rebel. The romantic heroes of Watership Down are out of the Arthurian tradition, not out of the hutch.

Dialogue, therefore, is not simply transcribed speech, but distilled speech. The “filler” we hear and overhear in live conversation (“phatic speech,” the opposite of “emphatic”) is edited away, even as the weight of implication is increased. It takes careful editing to create natural-sounding dialogue. Monologue in the right place can be a powerful tool, and some characters may be eloquent, but natural-sounding dialogue is probably ungrammatical; it may be full of slang, jargon, repetition, and various sorts of awkwardness. Generally, that means keeping things brief and paying attention to the rhythm of the sentences, which will itself reveal character, as will the failure or refusal to speak. A character who speaks several consecutive sentences might come across as a windbag (which of course may be your intention) or the author's puppet. Often the first and last words, phrases, or sentences of a character's speech can be eliminated. The character's intentions and preoccupations will shine through because of the leaps they make in their dialogue, as well as the the things they can't bring themselves to say aloud. Even rote exchanges, however, can call up images. A character who says, “It is indeed a pleasure to meet you” carries his back at a different angle, dresses differently, from a character who says, “Hey, man, what's up?”

Dialogue is action when it contains the possibility of change. A crucial (and sometimes difficult) distinction to make is between speech that is mere discussion or debate and speech that is drama or action. If in doubt, ask yourself: Can this conversation between characters really change anything? When two characters have made up their minds and know each other's positions on some political or philosophical matter, for instance, they may argue with splendid eloquence but there will be no discovery and nothing to decide, and therefore no opportunity for change. No matter how significant their topic, we are likely to find them wooden and uninteresting. … In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome; we need to feel that, even if it's unlikely they will change their minds, they might change their lives.

In fact, the territory of a character's mind is most likely to be the center of the action. Aristotle says that a man “is his desire,” that is, his character is defined by his ultimate purpose, good or bad. Thought, says Aristotle, is the process by which a person works backward in his mind from his goal to determine what action he can take toward that goal at a given moment.

It is not, for example, your ultimate desire to read this book. Very likely you don't even “want” to read it; you'd rather be sleeping or jogging or making love. But your ultimate goal is, say, to be a rich, respected, and famous writer. In order to attain this goal, you reason, you must know as much about the craft as you can learn. To do this, you would like to take a graduate degree at the Writer's Workshop in Iowa. To do that, you must take an undergraduate degree in ________, where you now find yourself, and must get an A in Ms. or Mr. ________'s creative writing course. To do that, you must produce a character sketch from one of the prompts at the end of this chapter by a week from Tuesday. To do so, you must sit here reading this chapter now instead of sleeping, jogging, or making love. Your ultimate motive has led you logically backward to a deliberate “moral” decision on the action you can take at this minor crossroad. In fact, it turns out that you want to be reading after all.

If you aim for a universal character you may end up with a vague or dull or windy one. If you set out to write a typical character you're likely to produce a caricature, because people are typical only in the generalized qualities that lump them together. Typical is the most provincial adjective in a writer's vocabulary, signaling that you're writing only for those who share your assumptions. A "typical" schoolgirl in Dar es Salaam is a very different type from one in San Francisco. Furthermore, every person is typical of many things successively or simultaneously. She may be in turn a typical schoolgirl, bride, divorcée, and feminist. He may be at one and the same time a typical New Yorker, math professor, doting father, and adulterer. It is in the confrontation and convolution of types that much of our individuality is produced.

The history of Western literature shows a movement downward and inward: downward through society from royalty to gentry to the middle classes to the lower classes to the dropouts; inward from heroic action to social drama to individual consciousness to the subconscious to the unconscious. What has remained consistent is that, for the time spent in an author's world, we stand with the protagonist or protagonists, we "see their point of view," and the fiction succeeds largely because we are willing to grant them a goodness that we would not grant them in life.

Often the notion of change is misunderstood by new writers to mean change that is abrupt and absolute, from Scrooge to do-gooder—but this rarely happens in life or in convincing fiction. Rather, change can be as subtle as a step in a new direction, a slight shift in belief, or a willingness to question a rigid view or recognize previously unseen value in a person or situation. Something is visible that was not visible before.

Character itself is a product of place and culture. We need to know in what atmosphere a character operates in order to understand the significance of the action. Scarlett O’Hara of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind operates as she does because she grew up in heat, damp, and luxury, surrounded by slaves whose loyalty she counts on without examining their lives. Sethe of Toni Morrison’s Beloved behaves as she does because she grew up enslaved in the same heat and damp, in perpetual terror of the master who comes for her and her babies after she reaches freedom.

In each of these plots, there is both intense desire and great danger in the pursuit of that desire; generally speaking, this shape holds true for all plots. It can be called 3-D: drama equals desire plus danger. One common fault of talented young writers is to create a main character who is essentially passive. This is understandable; as a writer you are an observer of human nature and activity, and so you identify easily with a character who observes, reflects, and suffers. But such a character's passivity transmits itself to the page, and the story also becomes passive.

It's important to realize that the great dangers in life and in literature are not necessarily the most spectacular. Another mistake frequently made by young writers is to think that they can best introduce drama into their stories by way of murderers, chase scenes, crashes, and vampires, the external stock dangers of pulp and TV. In fact, all of us know that the most profound impediments to our desire usually lie close to home, in our own bodies, personalities, friends, lovers, and families. More people will suffer a parent's neglect than a stranger's violence; fewer will die from a gunshot than a heart attack; more passion is destroyed at the breakfast table than in a time warp.

While the pattern of either conflict or connection may dominate in a given work, a story which is only about the conflict will be shallow. There must be some deepening of our understanding of the characters, which is achieved not just through conflicts between good and bad, but through conflicts of one good versus another: does a man join up to serve his country, or stay home to help protect and raise his children? The writer strives to bring art to a level where a story is not just about the inevitable trouble, and not just about the conflict of good and bad, but also about the conflict of loyalty with loyalty, honesty with honesty, love with love.

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order. Once we have the facts, we inevitably look for the links between them, and only when we find such links are we satisfied that we “understand.” Rote memorization in a science class bores almost everyone. Grasp and a sense of discovery begin only when we perceive why “a body in motion tends to remain in motion” and what an immense effect this actuality has on the phenomena of our lives.

Many editors and writers insist that the short story and the novel are vastly different creatures. It is my belief, however, that, like the distinction between story and plot, the distinction between the two forms is very simple, and that many and profound possibilities of difference proceed from that simple source: a short story is short, and a novel is long.

Readers of genre fiction have very specific expectations when it comes to plot, characters, setting, and theme, and each genre has its own conventions and rules. Literary fiction differs from genre fiction fundamentally in the fact that the former is character-driven, the latter plot-driven. There is a strong tendency in genre fiction—though not a binding rule—to imply that life is fair and to let the hero or heroine, after great struggle, win out in the end; and a complementary tendency in literary fiction to posit that life is not fair, that triumph is partial and happiness tentative, that human existence is full of ambiguities, and that the hero and heroine are subject to mortality.

Young adult, or YA fiction, and its middle-grade subset, are not really genres but a marketing tool of publishers capitalizing on the success of series like Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter—and hoping to foster the reading habit in technologically inclined generations. YA books have always been written but not called that: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, to name but a few classics.

Magic realism uses the techniques and devices of realism—verisimilitude, ordinary lives and settings, familiar psychology—and introduces events of an impossible or fantastic nature, never leaving the tone and techniques of realism. Whereas fantasy attempts to bedazzle its readers with the amazing quality of the magic, magic realism works in the opposite direction, to convince the reader that the extraordinary occurs in the context and the guise of the ordinary.

The limited omniscient viewpoint is one in which the author may move with some, but not all, of the omniscient author's freedom. The most commonly used form of the limited omniscient point of view is one in which the author can see events objectively and also has access to the mind of one character, but not to the minds of the others, nor to any explicit powers of judgment. Limited omniscience is particularly useful for the short story because it very quickly establishes the point-of-view character or means of perception. The short story is so compressed a form that there is rarely time or space to develop more than one consciousness. Staying with external observation and one character's thoughts helps control the focus and avoid awkward point-of-view shifts. A further advantage of limited omniscience is that it mimics our individual experience of life, that is, our own inability to penetrate the minds and motivations of others, which can lead to the kinds of conflicts or struggles for connection that inspire much fiction.

When point of view fails, Hills argues, it is always because the perception we are using for the course of the story is different from that of the character who is moved or changed by the action. Even when a narrator seems to be a peripheral observer and the story is "about" someone else, in fact it is the narrator who is changed, and must be, in order for us to be satisfied by our emotional identification with him or her.

The narrator is confined to reporting what she or he could realistically know. More than that, although the narrator may certainly interpret actions, deliver dictums, and predict the future, these remain the fallible opinions of a human being. We are not bound to accept them as we are bound to accept the interpretations, truths, and predictions of the omniscient author. You may want us to accept the narrator's word, and then the most difficult part of your task, and the touchstone of your story's success, will be to convince us to trust and believe the narrator.

Huck's moral instincts are better than he himself can understand. (Notice, incidentally, how Huck's lack of education is communicated by word choice and syntax and how sparse the misspellings are.) So author and reader are in intellectual opposition to Huck the narrator, but morally identify with him. Similarly reliable "unreliable" narrators, whose distorted views reveal a strangely accurate portrait of the social institutions that confine them, include Chief Bromden, the narrator of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the "hysterical" wife and patient, forbidden to write, who relates Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story "The Yellow Wallpaper."

The "appropriation" and representation of other minds is, and will become increasingly, the business of writers seeking to imagine their truth. Yet the questions will continue to be asked and the charge of appropriation raised until that mythic future in which the experience of all people is shared and equal.

Every reader reading is a self-deceiver: We simultaneously “believe” a story and know that it is a fabrication. Our belief in the reality of the story may be so strong that it produces physical reactions—tears, trembling, sighs, gasps, a headache. At the same time, as long as the fiction is working for us, we know that our submission is voluntary, that we have, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointed out, suspended disbelief.

A conceit, which can be either metaphor or simile, is a comparison of two things radically and startlingly unlike—in Samuel Johnson’s words, “yoked by violence together.” A conceit is as far removed as possible from the purely sensuous comparison of “the eyes of the potato.” It compares two things that have very little or no immediately apprehensible similarity, and so it is the nature of the conceit to be long. The author must explain to us, sometimes at great length, why these things can be said to be alike. When John Donne compares a flea to the Holy Trinity, the two images have no areas of reference in common, and we don’t understand. He must explain to us that the flea, having bitten both the poet and his lover, now has the blood of three souls in its body.

Comparison is not a frivolity. It is, on the contrary, the primary business of the brain. Some eighteenth-century philosophers spoke of the human mind as a tabula rasa, a “blank slate” on which sense impressions are recorded, compared, and grouped. Now we’re more likely to speak of the mind as a computer “storing” and “processing” “data.” What both metaphors acknowledge is that comparison is the basis of all learning and all reasoning.

People constantly function symbolically. We must do so because we rarely know exactly what we mean, and if we do we are not willing to express it, and if we are willing we are not able, and if we are able we are not heard, and if we are heard we are not understood. Words are unwieldy and unyielding, and we leap past them with intuition, body language, tone, and symbol. “Is the oven supposed to be on?” he asks. He is only peripherally curious about whether the oven is supposed to be on. He is really complaining: You’re scatterbrained and extravagant with the money I go out and earn.

When literary symbols fail, it is most often in this difficult and essential mutuality. In a typical example, we begin the story in the room of a dying woman alone with her collection of perfume bottles. The story ranges back over her rich and sensuous life, and at the end we focus on an empty perfume bottle. It is meant to move us at her death, but it does not. Yet the fault is not in the perfume bottle. Presumably a perfume bottle may express mortality as well as a hat may express racial equality. The fault is in the use of the symbol, which has not been integrated into the texture of the story. As Bonnie Friedman puts it in Writing Past Dark, “Before a thing can be a symbol it must be a thing. It must do its job as a thing in the world before and during and after you have projected your meaning all over it.”

In the first draft of my novel Cutting Stone, for instance, I opened with the sentence, “It took a hundred and twelve bottles of champagne to see the young Poindexters off to Arizona.” A page later one character whispered to another that young Mr. Poindexter had “consumption.” I worked on this book for a year (taking my characters off to Arizona where they dealt with the desert heat, thirst, alcoholism, loss of religion, and the development of mining interests and the building trade) before I saw the connection between “consumption” and “champagne.” When I understood that simple link, I understood the overarching theme—surely latent in the idea from the moment it had taken hold of me—between tuberculosis, spiritual thirst, consumerism, and addiction, all issues of “consumption.”

Within a day or two of the workshop, novelist-playwright Michelle Carter advises, the author should try to “re-hear criticism,” that is, to assess what it is readers are responding to, which may not be apparent from the suggested “fix.” For example, if a number of readers suggest changing the story’s point of view from third person to first, Carter might reinterpret that to mean that the narrator seems too remote from the characters—not that first-person narration is literally a better choice, but that readers want a more immediate experience of the main character’s emotional dilemma.

My folder of drafts of this passage now runs to forty pages, excessive and obsessive perhaps, but it is after all the beginning of the book and must be right. I have noticed over the years that my digging at, fiddling with, scratching away at a scene will often turn up something much more fundamental than a new image or a livelier verb. In this case, I gradually realized that the reason the scene must be in somebody else’s voice is that the heroine does not remember it. Traumatized by her flight, she cannot recall witnessing her father’s death until she is nearly fifty years old. When I realized that, I understood much better what story I was telling and how the plot could be shaped and resolved.