With my second cataract operation behind me, I’m amazed at how much my sight has improved (and I’m also adjusting to my new cyborg self, now that I host a plastic lens in each eye). For a while, though, I found it difficult to read, with most texts looking like this

unless I closed one eye. I found this a bit of a trial, until I realized that I could easily super-size the fonts on my iBook and Kindle apps so that reading once again became a breeze. Large print editions, on demand!

Though the e-book revolution is often touted as the domain of the young, who have grown up at ease with reading from a screen, my recent experience makes me think that the e-book will soon become a haven for the older reader, a Boomer Book Bonanza. As our eyes (and the rest of us) slowly slip into that good night, personalized, adjustable font size will ensure that reading remains a pleasurable obsession.

And yet. Gazing on my shelves of hardcover and paperback books, I can recall so many specific moments when I read a particular novel or story collection, and those copies have aged with me, some warped from a dunk in the Yukon River or scented with African dust, as I mentioned in my previous post. A print book absorbs the warmth of a hand, might be dappled with coffee stains, has a wrinkled spine—the world works upon a print book, as it works upon us.

And yet. I can morph an e-book’s format to my need, I carry the equivalent of over thirty books without strain, and I can download a necessary book on the instant.

I’m reminded of the first week or so after that first cataract operation, when if I closed one eye I’d have far-sighted vision, and if I closed the other eye, near-sighted vision. With both eyes open, the world turned fuzzy. My book allegiances are fuzzy now, too: I appreciate a print book’s solid self and an e-book’s digital adaptability. I blink back and forth, wishing in vain for resolution.

Now that I’m recovering from cataract surgery, I find that I can’t read for more than short stretches of time, and I’m reminded of how essential to my day are the acts of reading and writing. I’m the sort of person who carries a book along wherever I go, on the chance that I’ll find a moment or two to plunge back into the unfolding world of a novel or short story. I carry a notebook as well, to capture whatever small patch of inspiration I might stumble across. These days my iPad often doubles as book and notebook.

So, sitting here at home on the couch, impatiently letting my eyes rest before I try a little more reading, I’ve been thinking back to the unusual settings I’ve carried the companionable presence of a book. When I was nineteen I canoed for about 400 miles on the Yukon River one stretch of a summer, and I can remember reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse while sitting by the edge of the water after a long day of paddling. I don’t understand now why in the world I thought this novel would be a proper fit with a place so wild that we could travel for days without seeing another soul, where we could turn a corner and surprise a moose into disappearing up the riverbank and into the forest. But I do recall the exhilaration of reading the passage where Mr. Ramsey’s “splendid mind” has reached the Q of knowledge but cannot move further to R, while before me the midnight sun slipped briefly behind the peaks of the Canadian Rockies. I still have my copy of the book, a bit waterlogged from a tumble into white water.

I’ve lived in small villages in the West African country of Ivory Coast, where my wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, has conducted her research on the culture of the Beng people, and of course I brought along a pile of books for those long journeys. In the photo below, I’m sitting before our two-room mud-brick house in the village of Kosangbé, writing in a notebook, perhaps inspired after reading from one of the two books beside me. The book on the top is The Voice that Is Great within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Hayden Carruth. I still have that copy too, rich with the scent of African dust.

Two stories of reading in Africa most stand out in my memory. The first goes back to 1980, when I read Njal’s Saga, perhaps the greatest of the medieval Icelandic sagas, filled with blood feuds that last generations, punctuated by complex legal maneuverings between the aggrieved parties at a formal gathering called The Thing. Again, I wonder, what possessed me to bring such a book to a tropical country? (I also read a great deal of African literature while living in Ivory Coast, including Okot p’Bitek’s magnificent Song of Lawino). But this particular story of my reading comes right after I finished the book, sitting in that same palm rib chair pictured above, and realizing as a chill swept through me that once again malaria had come my way.

It was the most serious attack I ever endured, and deep in the night, with my temperature stuck at an alarming 106 degrees, my wife made a re-hydration drink for me in another room while I lay beneath mosquito netting, listening to the clank of her metal spoon stirring against a metal cup. That clanking transformed, in my fevered mind, into the sound and sight of two ghostly Viking warriors—right out of Njal’s Saga—standing beside the bed and striking at each other’s sword and shield. A memorable moment in my history of reading, but I do not recommend anyone seeking out malaria for a similar experience.

The second memory also involves illness, unfortunately. In 1993, near the end of a summer’s stay in the Beng village of Asagbé, I came down with pneumonia, and spent the good part of two weeks knocked out in bed. By that time I’d gone through nearly all the books I brought along to the village. Only one was left, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and what an unsettling fit that was, as I hacked away painfully beneath mosquito netting while reading about the doomed coughing patients of an isolated tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.

On the other hand, reading Miguel Torga’s Tales & More Tales from the Mountain while exploring the wild northern ranges of Portugal with my family a few years ago helped me to better understand the impulse behind this medieval stone-walled wolf trap we came upon.

I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has found a sometimes incongruous fit between the outer world of travel and the inner travel of reading. If anyone out there also has a strange or oddly fitting mix of book and place, feel free to leave a comment!

When I was a college student I used to work as a cab driver in New York City.

My first week on the job was a disastrous time. Every single cab I’d been assigned had broken down: the first night, a tire blew out; the second, the engine overheated, steam rising from under the hood in the middle of an intersection; the third, the horn wouldn’t stop blaring; the fourth, my taxi stopped and started unpredictably—a mysterious mechanical hiccup that chased every passenger away after a few blocks; and at the beginning of a thunderstorm on the fifth night I discovered that only one windshield wiper worked—the one on the passenger side, of course.

I eventually discovered why all those taxis broke down on me. By the start of my second week on the job I was afraid to answer to my name when the taxi dispatcher called it out in the waiting room, and I had a long time to wait and worry, because it seemed I was always the last one assigned a cab.

I remember sitting there beside one of the guys I had categorized in my mind as a lifer—a man with an unshaven, pockmarked face, a gut and greasy uncombed hair. Someone my young self couldn’t imagine becoming, was afraid of the very thought, but he was friendly, complaining about the weather, wishing me good luck for the night while he waited, so I found myself pouring out to him the disasters of my first few days on the job.

He nodded sympathetically through it all, and then simply offered, his voice lowered, this advice: “You got to take care of your people, if you want them to take care of you.”

I nodded my head, as if I understood. Soon the dispatcher called him, then a few more guys were called, and two of them had reported to the waiting room after me. Why was I always one of the last drivers given a cab?

Idiot. Of course—I checked my wallet, to see what sort of bills were there, how many people I could afford to take care of–who, as it turned out, were the dispatcher, the guy in the lot who chose the cabs, and the two workers who checked the water, the oil, the tire pressure, the wipers.

“You got to take care of your people, if you want them to take care of you.” Ethical questions of bribery aside, sometimes I think this is the best writing advice I’ve ever received. Isn’t it the web of our relationships that gives us a center of gravity, that gives our interior landscapes the context of others? And as writers, we employ what we’ve learned of ourselves, of our relationships in order to create the breathing space of difference for our characters, to help us imagine their own particular realities.

One of the best examples I’ve ever seen of this aspect of the writing process is in James Baldwin’s novel Another Country. One of his characters, Vivaldo, is a budding novelist struggling with the characters he’s created:

“On a Saturday in early March, Vivaldo stood at his window and watched the morning rise. The wind blew through the empty streets with a kind of dispirited moan; had been blowing all night long, while Vivaldo sat at his worktable, struggling with a chapter which was not going well. He was terribly weary—he had worked in the bookstore all day and then come downtown to do a moving job—but this was not the reason for his paralysis. He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But it did not seem clear to them. He could move them about but they did not themselves move. He put words into their mouths which they uttered sullenly, unconvinced. With the same agony, or greater, with which he attempted to seduce a woman, he was trying to seduce his people: he begged them to surrender up to him their privacy. And they refused—without, for all their ugly intransigence, showing the faintest desire to leave him. They were waiting for him to find the key, press the nerve, tell the truth. Then, they seemed to be complaining, they would give him all he wished for and much more than he was now willing to imagine.”

Much more than he was now willing to imagine. A beautiful phrase. If you take care of your people–your characters–by offering the truth of yourself as you understand it, then they just might take care of you with their own hidden truths. It’s not so simple to accomplish, though. We all have our own personal histories to unravel, knots inside ourselves that it sometimes seems no untying can manage. But believe me, you do not want your cab to break down five nights in a row.

Blinded by an accident when he was six years old, the French memoirist Jacques Lusseyran learned to prefer his blind life over his previous sighted experience. “I no longer saw faces, and knew in all probability I should go through life without seeing them,” he wrote of those early sightless days, in his book And There Was Light.

Lusseyran’s greatest challenge wasn’t the lack of sight, but a world of confounding new messages encoded in sound. Without the distractions of vision, he could now hear what sighted people couldn’t. “People were not at all what they were said to be, and never the same for more than two minutes at a stretch. Some were, of course, but that was a bad sign, a sign that they did not want to understand or be alive . . . not having their faces before my eyes, I caught them off guard. People are not accustomed to this, for they only dress up for those who are looking at them.”

Sound changed for Lusseyran, forcing him, at first against his will, toward a secret entry into the world: “How should I explain to other people that all my feelings toward them, feelings of sympathy or antipathy, came to me from their voices? I tried to tell a few people it was so, that they could do nothing about it and neither could I. But soon I had to stop because it was clear that the idea was frightening to them.”

This hard-won ability to navigate the hidden psychological landscape of voices led him, at the age of 17, to become the leader of one of the largest French resistance organizations during the Nazi occupation of Paris. He was present at every recruiting interview because he alone could determine who could be trusted to join the cell, as he writes in his essay collection What One Sees Without Eyes: “Each new applicant was introduced to me, and to me alone. It was much easier for me than for anyone else to strip him of all pretenses. His voice betrayed his inner being, and sometimes it betrayed him. Finally I could make use of that inner life which fate had forced me to discover so early and so thoroughly.”

Only once was he overruled, and when that new conscript betrayed the underground cell Lusseyran and his comrades were sent to Buchenwald. Where, remarkably, he—a blind man—survived. In his essay “Poetry in Buchenwald” he explains that he did so by reciting aloud, from memory, poetry, and teaching others to do so as well. “Poetry chased men out of their ordinary refuges, which are places full of dangers. These bad refuges were memories of the time of freedom, personal histories. Poetry made a new place, a clearing . . . I learned that poetry is an act, an incantation, a kiss of peace, a medicine. I learned that poetry is one of the rare, very rare things in the world which can prevail over cold and hatred. No one had taught me this.”

Over the years I’ve found that I keep coming back to Lusseyran’s writing, for the particular mix of clarity and spirituality that marks his vision of the world, and his simple but powerful credo of paying attention. When Lusseyran could summon his concentration, he could, sightless, identify nearby trees, even small details of the landscape around him. “Being attentive unlocks a sphere of reality that no one suspects . . . the seeing commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes . . . permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew.”

This sort of deep attentiveness is a discipline a writer can direct not only outward, but inward as well. In creative non-fiction, in memoir, you write about what has happened to you, and how you have happened to others, but that is only the merest beginning. What is most important in non-fiction is how you tell what happened. And that brings us to voice, the creative nonfiction coin of the realm.

Voice is, in many ways, the written equivalent of your speech patterns, or the shifting landscape of your thought, or some combination thereof. One way to discover your own pattern would be to close your eyes, though not to imagine what it would be like to be blind. Instead, imagine what someone who is blind and attentive, like Lussreyran, might hear in your voice. Try listening, when you speak, to what your voice reveals and tries to conceal of what you know of yourself. If Jacques Lusseyran were listening to you, what do you think he would hear?

We all know just how messy it is to write, how much guessing, and chance, and simple due diligence through an intractable problem will get us to where we need to go. But through all the joyful and painful mess of creation, structure somehow does get its say. Patterns do begin to emerge, and it’s good to know what to look for, and what is possible, when those larger units of meaning need to be paid attention to as our writing progresses.

Out of chaos does come order. An interesting way to think about this process is to examine the work of the English mathematician Michael Barnsley. He studied the “patterns generated by living organisms,” which he called “the global construction of fractals by means of iterated function systems.” Barnsley also called this “the chaos game.”

Here’s how it’s played, and I’m quoting from James Gleik’s book Chaos: Making a New Science: “To play the chaos game quickly, you need a computer with a graphics screen and a random number generator, but in principle a sheet of paper and a coin work just as well. You chose a starting point somewhere on the paper. It does not matter where. You invent two rules, a heads rule and a tails rule. A rule tells you how to take one point to another: ‘Move two inches to the northeast,’ or ‘Move 25 percent closer to the center.’ Now you start flipping the coin and marking points, using the heads rule when the coin comes up heads and the tails rule when it comes up tails. If you throw away the first fifty points, like a blackjack dealer burying the first few cards in a new deal, you will find the chaos game producing not a random field of dots but a shape, revealed with greater and greater sharpness as the game goes on.”

This is something you actually can try at home. The results can be pretty freaky, and remember, as Barnsley says, “if the image is complicated, the rules will be complicated.” While Barnsley’s game does depend on a formula of advance planning, the process looks remarkably like what we all go through as we write and revise, write and revise, as what seems obscure at first becomes clearer and clearer with each successive draft. Structure is what you make it, and the structures you choose (or choose to discover) become embodied by the individuality of your creative vision.

I read, and read obsessively, in search of transformation, of following any author’s eyes to a new angle on the world–for me, that’s entertainment.

One author who does this consistently is Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist who won the 2005 Man Booker International Prize and is year after year shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sometimes, when I wax too poetic about his genius displayed in novels such as Broken April, The General of the Dead Army, The Palace of Dreams or Chronicle in Stone, a listener will offer a quizzical look, as if to say, What could be so great about a novelist from Albania, of all places?

Well, why read the stories of a blind librarian from Buenos Aires, or the poems of an unmarried recluse in Amherst? The specific moment of creation, if powerful enough, extends far past its geographical–and temporal–origin.

Kadare’s novel The Pyramid takes place 4,600 years in the past, during the building of the pyramid of the pharaoh Cheops, and whether you’ve been to Egypt or not, you’ve certainly seen this enormous structure’s image.

It’s one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Kadare, however, wants you to look closer, wants you to see the hidden stories of its construction, stone by stone, in the chapter “Daily Chronicle: Right Hand Face, Western Arris”:

“The eleven thousand three hundred and seventy-fourth stone was laid during the second moon after the eclipse. It took a little more time to install than the previous one but caused fewer deaths. As if it had nothing more urgent to do than to fulfill the quota of corpses spared by its predecessor, the eleven thousand three hundred and seventy-fifth stone wrought havoc among its carriers. That is how the stonemasons Mumba, Ru, and Thutse fell, along with nine other nameless workmen; Astix the Cretan was struck down by apoplexy; and when the stone slipped back without warning, all the Libyans in the crew, as well as the Tur-Tur brothers, fourteen people in all, were squashed to pulp. Even when the stone was firmly in place and the series of deaths seemed to have come to an end, the deputy foreman died, followed by three Nubian sculptors. They had laid down on the masonry to rest a little, and it was only realized that they had stopped breathing when the supervisor came up with his whip to punish them for taking too long a break. The eleven thousand three hundred and seventy-sixth stone . . . ”

The narratives of this short chapter–only ten pages–continue to the eleven thousand three hundred and ninety-ninth stone, highlighting by implication all the stones that came before, and projecting into the future all the stones that have yet to arrive at the growing pyramid. Kadare’s remorseless accretion of deadly detail is balanced by an implicit sympathy for those forgotten fates, as if each description is an act of reclamation. After reading merely this one chapter from Kadare’s novel, one will never be able to see an image of the great pyramid without remembering that slow, relentless placement of each stone, and how each is storied with a terrible human cost.

Yet Kadare’s larger point doesn’t rest on a single pyramid. Behind what can be read of course as a blunt political statement, Kadare also seems to be saying that even the most glorious achievements of the human imagination can be laced with cruelty and tragedy. And so we move from a single architectural monument to a deeper understanding of the act of creation itself, how the impulse behind invention is far more complex, far more problematic than we might like to believe.

Recently my Portuguese pal Paulo Dias Figueiredo introduced me to the work of Ruy Belo, a poet who Paulo claims is second only in 20th century Portuguese stature to the poet Fernando Pessoa (and I realize that I haven’t yet posted anything about Pessoa–I will soon). After reading a clutch of poems by Belo, translated by Richard Zenith at Poetry International Web, I have to agree.

The following poem reminds me of when I lived in the small village of Kosangbé in the Ivory Coast and mentioned once to a friend, San Kofi, as we were passing a batch of birds making a racket in a nearby tree, that those birds could really sing. Kofi shot me quite the startled look, and said “Birds don’t sing, they weep.” I had nothing to say in reply, still swept up in the thought that what I heard as joy, Kofi’s culture heard as sorrow.

That exchange stayed with me, and led me to the understanding that birds don’t sing or weep unless we say they do. And, apparently, birds are the liveliest fruit of a tree, because Ruy Belo says they are.

A FEW PROPOSITIONS WITH BIRDS AND TREES THAT
THE POET CONCLUDES WITH A REFERENCE TO THE HEART

RUY BELO

Birds are born on the tips of trees
The trees I see yield birds instead of fruit
Birds are the liveliest fruit of trees
Birds begin where trees end
Birds make the trees sing
On reaching the height of birds the trees swell and stir
passing from the vegetable to the animal kingdom
Like birds their leaves alight on the ground
when autumn quietly falls over the fields
I feel like saying that birds emanate from the trees
but I’ll leave that manner of speaking to the novelist
it’s complicated and doesn’t work in poetry
it still hasn’t been isolated from philosophy
I love trees especially those that yield birds
Who hangs them there on the branches?
Whose hand is it whose myriad hand?
I pass by and my heart’s not the same

Artist image: Birds and Trees, by Fred Tomaselli.

Recently one of my students mentioned in class that she felt she included too much detail in her stories, that she never knew how to focus on what to keep and what to leave out.

I responded that she did indeed know how to do this, and that she did so every minute of every day. Our field of vision is filled with innumerable detail, but we have learned to focus on what is most important before us: the person who is speaking, or a car driving past recklessly, a tree especially blazing with color, the sound of unexpected footsteps. Everything else fades into the background, if only momentarily. If we couldn’t continually improvise this ongoing dance of focusing and filtering, we wouldn’t be able to survive.

The Italian writer Alberto Moravia has written a wonderful short story, “All-Seeing,” about a man who loses this capacity to filter, and what this loss does to his life. It’s from a collection with the overly dramatic English title Command and I Will Obey You (much more exciting than the original Italian Una Cosa e una Cosa–which I guess might translate as something like, One Thing After Another).

In this story, a man declares that “I am worried by my growing and irresistible capacity for seeing several things at the same moment, that is, by my all-seeingness.”

He continues: “One day, as I was walking along a street, I distinctly heard a voice calling me: “Lucio!” I stopped. looked up, and and found myself staring at the façade, all green glass and brown metal, of a very modern building. Then as my glance traveled up over the glossy surface, I became suddenly aware that I was seeing, simultaneously, everything that was going on behind all the windows of the building. This plurality of vision had, as I immediately felt, a significance which was, to say the least, disconcerting: since I saw everything, I was unable, in fact, to isolate, to distinguish anything.”

Life goes from bad to worse for poor Lucio. His telephone out of order, he slips into the jewelry shop next door to make a call and he sees “one by one, all the minute objects that filled the showcases, each of them in its own little box of red morocco lined with white silk.” He sees the clock and the framed pictures on the wall, the Chinese vase on an ebony stand, an open safe, and the dead body of his neighbor, Alessio, who had been robbed minutes before. He sees all of this equally, and so misses the drama of his friend’s murder.

Later, at a picnic in the park with his wife, the sights and sounds of nature are of equal importance to him as a nearby car crash, and his lack of reaction appalls his wife, who thinks he’s become a monster. She then embarks on a love affair, and when once Lucio walks in on the lovers he sees everything in the room and yet sees nothing amiss. His lack of concern further enrages his wife, who divorces him. Then on he continues with his life, where all that he encounters seems “equally worthy of attention, equally important.”

Unlike Lucio, everyone else enjoys the unconscious talent of filtering out the trivial and concentrating on what most demands attention. When a writer works to become more conscious of this ability, then the dilemma of choosing significant detail for a story, or a significant memory for an essay, begins to lose some of its daunting mystery. Simply (simply!) adapt what you already know how to do in your daily life and apply it to the page.

When J.M.G. Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2008, I’m sad to have to admit that I was one of those who wondered, “Who the hell is he?”

I read a good deal of international literature, and so I was surprised his name had never crossed my path. Well, my fault, my shame, not his! His novel Desert, which I’ve just finished reading, won the Grand Prix Paul Morand by the Académie Française in 1980 and was an international bestseller. Set mainly in the Sahara, it’s an extraordinary novel, one that is written in such a way as to evoke a different culture’s sense of time, of history, of a particular way of looking at the world. It’s a book that asks a reader, with gentle authority, to slow down and pay a different sort of attention.

One of my favorite moments is when the main character, a young girl named Lalla, watches an old man nurse a fire to life:

“Then he lights the fire with his tinderbox, being very careful to place the flame on the side where there is no wind. Naman is very good at building fires, and Lalla watches his every move closely, to learn. He knows how to find just the right place, neither too exposed, nor too sheltered, in the hollow of the dunes.

“The fire starts up and then goes out two or three times, but Naman doesn’t really seem to notice. Every time the flame dies, he roots around in the twigs with his hand, without being afraid of getting burned. That’s the way fire is; it likes people who aren’t afraid of it. So then the flame leaps up again, not very strong at first; you can barely see the tip of it glowing between the branches, then suddenly it blazes up around the whole base of the bonfire, throwing out a bright light and crackling abundantly.”

That’s the way fire is; it likes people who aren’t afraid of it.

This, I think, is the central moment in the novel. Lalla is watching to learn how to start a fire, but what she’s really learning is not to be afraid of its danger and, expanding this lesson, not to be afraid of danger in general. It’s a lesson learned that enables Lalla to survive the future twists and turns of her life.

That’s the way fire is; it likes people who aren’t afraid of it.

This sentence and in fact the entire passage can also be read as a fairly straightforward metaphoric description of the process of writing: the quiet struggle one goes through to bring the work alive, the patience required, but most of all the strength one needs to face a story’s secret dangers, its as yet unrealized revelations. Root around in what can’t be seen, suppress your fear of failure, then fan those invisible fires that, with a little luck, will further fuel your imagination.

The longer I write, the more I’m intrigued by how a word can conceal as much if not far more than it reveals. Yet if regarded with care, any word can serve not as a wall but as a window to what it can’t further express.

One of my favorite books is The Hundred Greatest Stars, by the astronomer James B. Kaler, because he transforms the word “star” from a single encompassing category into something like a prism reflecting the light of a dizzying variety of stellar objects.

Take, for instance, the star V V Cephei. This red supergiant, a mere 2,000 light years away, is so large that its diameter is almost the size of the orbit of Saturn. How big is that? Well, take a look at this humbling comparison with our own star, the sun:

Another star, W Ursae Majoris, is an even closer neighbor, only 160 light years away, which places it practically right across the street from us in the galactic neighborhood. This is a double star system, though with a doozy of a twist—the two stars are so close together that they actually touch as they whirl around each other, forming, in essence, a strange revolving single object:

Kaler’s book is filled with white dwarf stars; double, triple and even four star systems; neutron star x-ray bursters; super magnetic stars; a whole panoply of cosmic difference. After reading his book, I’ve found it impossible to peer up at the night sky and see those scattered grains of light as anything resembling a uniform category. The word “star” now offers the infinite possibilities of the universe itself.

Our universe is a big place, though, so why not take a look at a word that operates on a more intimate level? A smile is among the most common of human expressions, one that cuts across all cultures. Yet the word “smile” implies a singular form that it is not and can never be. As Daniel McNeill observes in his book The Face, smiles “vary like a kaleidoscope. Turn the tube slightly, change a nuance here or there, and a new meaning arises.” Some languages are better at expressing this morphing quality than others. In Japanese, several words take on this challenge: “niko-niko, a smile of peacefulness and content; nita-nita, a smile tinged with contempt; ni, a brief grin; niya-niya, an often unpleasant way of smiling when suppressing joy; ninmari, a smile after achieving a goal; chohshoh, a sneer.”

The task of a writer, it seems to me, is recognizing that any word will take you only so far, that its core definition is simply a first step. Without this understanding, words can actually restrict your vision of the world.

As a teacher, I’ve become weary of the words “beginning” and “ending,” which I feel limit my students’ attempts to learn how to shape a story. Sometimes a young writer’s story will first feature reams of exposition, backstory upon backstory before a scene finally offers the drama we crave, all in the service of “beginning” the story in some chronological fashion. And sometimes that same hypothetical young writer will “end” a story with a flourish that implies, well, that’s that!

Yet there can be no “beginning” to any story, because there will always be a series of events that have come before, and as for an “ending,” the world simply continues on its way regardless of our attempts at closure, doesn’t it?

So I ask my students to think of their first page as the point of entry into an already unfolding narrative, and to think of the last page as their point of departure from that same continuing narrative. Charles Dickinson’s hypnotic short story “Risk” may take place entirely during a single evening while a circle of friends and acquaintances play a game of Risk, but its most central drama concerns the loss of a child that occurred one year earlier. On the other hand, Graham Swift’s story “Learning to Swim,” though it takes place within an afternoon’s half hour at the beach, dramatizes the moment when a child makes his choice of navigation between his two warring parents, a choice that will, the reader assumes, set the structure of the family for many years to come.

Where you enter a narrative and where you exit gives you the shape of the fiction you are trying to call into being. Or, to put it more bluntly, the bullet may be the wider world of your narrative flying along, but the apple is your story.