[...] But of the thirty plots he can think up in an hour, only one—if even that—will catch and hold his interest, make him want to write. How odd, a different writer might say, that of all the stories one might tell about Helen, this writer has chosen a trivial, psychological climax, Helen’s surprise! What the writer’s interest means is that the climactic event has struck some chord in him, one that seems worth exploration. It’s by the whole process of first planning the fiction and then writing it—elaborating characters and details of setting, finding the style that seems appropriate to the feeling, discovering unanticipated requirements of the plot—that the writer finds out and communicates the story’s significance, intuited at the start. He knows that his first job is to authenticate what I earlier called the story’s primary meaning: Helen’s surprise. The surprise is a feeling, one that strikes us as conclusive, an implied discovery. But, like all conclusive feelings, Helen’s surprise suggests some larger, secondary meaning, not just one person’s feeling but a universal human feeling, some affirmation or recognition of a value. It is usually in this larger, secondary sense that we speak of the “meaning” of works of art.