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Is he not going to call, then? I don’t know. I guess he’s not. I seem to be having a harder time with this than I thought or it was worth.

In France, they have the story of a ballet dancer so moved by her role that, in a scene in which she was supposed to be dying, and touchingly reunited with h…

Look, the sun is a sort of bribe, you know, and so is a heavy thunderstorm or a snowfall. So is a dawn, though not I think a sunset. So is a warm bath or a shower, and a sound sleep. Bribes all, in the conspiracy of everything to continue to exist.

You can rely too much, my love, on the unspoken things. And the wry smile. I have that smile myself, and I’ve learned the silence, too, over the years. Along with your expressions, like No notion and Of necessity. What happens, though, when it is all unsaid, is that you wake up one morning, no, it’…

Really examine every time you use “look,” “watch,” “see,” “feel,” etc., and any other words that “filter” (via John Gardner) the prose through a perspective that is already well established. If we are in Jose’s close-third perspective, for example, we don’t need to know that Jose looked at the cloc…

Extended to larger parts of a story, like scene, the order of things is crucial. Take a story like Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hell-Heaven,” in which a daughter narrates her mother’s crush on a family friend. At the end of the story, the grown-up narrator reveals a secret: that after the friend got married, t…