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came from.
    I'll have more to say about reading a little later, but the essence is this: the primary and only necessary way of experiencing a work of literary art is not by "understanding" it in
    analytical terms; it is by thrumming to the work of art. Like the string of a stringed instrument you vibrate inside, a harmonic is set up. So to edit your work, you go back and thrum to it. And you go thrum, thrum, thrum, twang! And when you go twang! as a reader, mark that passage. And you thrum on and twang on and thrum and twang and thrum and twang. Then you go back to the twangs and instead of looking at the twangy spots and analyzing them in lit-crit ways, instead of consciously and wilfully applying what you understand with your mind about craft and techniques, you redream those passages.
    Rewriting is redreaming. Rewriting is redreaming till it all thrums.
    Let me return to Graham Greene. The compost heap of the novelist, the repository that exists apart from literal memory, apart from the conscious mind, is mostly made up of direct, sensual life experience. But it is also the proper place for all the fiction craft and technique that you properly and necessarily consciously learned. It is also the proper place for all the wonderful fiction you've read. All of these things must first be forgotten—at least while you are in your creative trance—before they can be authentically engaged in the creation of a work of art.
    What I'm going to talk about tonight is an essential of fiction as an art form—as essential as color is to painting and movement is to dance and sound is to music.
    I would say that of the three fundamentals of fiction, there are two that aspiring writers never miss: first, that fiction is about human beings; second, that it's about human emotion. Even when fiction writers are writing from their heads, abstracting and analyzing, they're mostly analyzing emotions; so even if they're not getting at the essence of emotion, they're trying to.
    But the third element, which is missing from virtually every student manuscript I've seen, has to do with the phenomenon of desire.
    Fiction is a temporal art form. Fiction exists in time. Poems by contrast are very condensed objects, virtually exempt from time. A poem may capture a fleeting momentary impulse; and the length of a line is usually a part of its essential form,
    so the poem is also an object on the page. But as soon as you let the line run on and you turn the page, you are upon a time, inevitably. And, as any Buddhist will tell you, you cannot exist as a human being on this planet for thirty seconds without desiring something.
    My favorite word in this regard—a word you will hear often when we discuss your manuscripts—is yearning. We yearn. We are the yearning creatures of this planet. There are superficial yearnings, and there are truly deep ones always pulsing beneath, but every second we yearn for something. And fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning.
    Yearning is always part of fictional character. In fact, one way to understand plot is that it represents the dynamics of desire. It's the dynamics of desire that is at the heart of narrative and plot.
    Those failed manuscripts of students and aspiring writers—many of them showing a lot of talent—contained characters with problems, attitudes, opinions, sensibility, voice, personality—all of those things, and often a wonderfully evoked milieu to boot. But none of those things automatically carries with it yearning. The dynamics of desire can be utterly missing from a story that is rich with all of those things.
    James Joyce appropriated from the Catholic church the term epiphany. An epiphany literally means "a shining forth." He brought that concept to bear on the moment in a work of art when something shines forth in its essence. That, he said, is the epiphany in a story or novel.
    What I would suggest is that there are two epiphanies in any good work of fiction. Joyce's is the