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.

I sometimes joke with my students that if they find themselves trapped in exposition, writing pages and pages in which their action doesn’t rise, all they need to do is drop this sentence into their story: “Then something happened that changed everything forever.” The story has no choice but to respond.

We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer’s goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.

That’s it.

What is the exact avor of the thrill? The writer doesn’t have to know. That’s what he’s writing to find out.

The story is not there to tell us what to think about happiness. It is there to help us think about it. It is, we might say, a structure to help us think.