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.

That’s really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another.

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.)

The exciting part of all of this, to me, is that we always have a basis on which to proceed. The reader is out there, and she’s real. She’s interested in life and, by picking up our work, has given us the benet of the doubt.

All we have to do is engage her.

To engage her, all we have to do is value her.

Likewise, as we’ll see in a bit, when Tolstoy recounts the thoughts or feelings of his characters, he does this succinctly and precisely, using simple objective sentences that seem factual in their syntax and modesty of assertion.

A fact draws us in. This seems to be one of those “laws of fiction” we’ve been seeking. “The car was dented and red” makes a car appear in the mind. Even more so if the fact is an action: “The dented red car slowly left the parking lot.” Notice how little we doubt that statement, the spontaneous, involuntary buy-in that makes us forget that there is no car and no parking lot.