A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we’re saying that it responds alertly to itself. This holds true in both directions; a brief description of a road tells us how to read the present moment but also all the past moments in the story and all those still to come.

As we’ve been saying, the story form is ruthlessly efficient. Everything in a story should be to purpose. Our working assumption is that nothing exists in a story by chance or merely to serve some documentary function. Every element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the story’s purpose.

It’s hard to get any beauty at all into a story. If and when we do, it might not be the type of beauty we’ve always dreamed of making. But we have to take whatever beauty we can get, however we can get it.

A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer. We feel her, over there on the production end of the process, imagining that we are as intelligent and worldly and curious as she is. Because she’s paying attention to where we are (to where she’s put us), she knows when we are “expecting a change” or “feeling skeptical of this new development” or “getting tired of this episode.” (She also knows when she’s delighted us and that, in that state, we’re slightly more open to whatever she’ll do next.)

But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.