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moral, the passionate, the poetic, hence the
shaping
idea—can’t be mapped and plotted. (Would this help—any more than a map hung on the wall changes the world?) It’s the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique—its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story’s challenge and the work that rises to meet it—a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.
    Since analysis has to travel backward, the path it goes is an ever-narrowing one, whose goal is the vanishing point, beyond which only “influences” lie. But the writer of the story, bound in the opposite direction, works into the open. The choices multiply, become more complicated and with more hanging on them, as with everything else that has a life and moves. “This story promises me fear and joy and so I write it” has been the writer’s beginning. The critic, coming to the end of his trail, may call out the starting point he’s found, but the writer knew his starting point first and for what it was—the jumping-off place. And all along, the character of the choices—the critic’s decisions and the writer’s—is wholly different. I think that the writer’s outbound choices were to him the
believable
ones, not necessarily defensible on other grounds; impelled, not subject to scheme but to feeling; that they came with an arrow inside them. They have been
fiction’s
choices: one-way and fateful; strict as art, obliged as feeling, powerful in their authenticity.
    The story and its analysis are not mirror-opposites of each other. They are not reflections, either one. Criticism indeed is an art, as a story is, but only the story is to some degree a vision; there is no explanation outside fiction for what its writer is learning to do. The simplest-appearing work may have been brought off (when it does not fail) on the sharp edge of experiment, and it was for this its writer was happy to leave behind him all he knew before, and the safety of that, when he began the new story.
    I feel that our ever-changing outside world and some learnable lessons about writing fiction are always waiting side by side for us to put into connection, if we can. A writer should say this only of himself and offer an example. In a story I wrote recently called “No Place for You, My Love,” the outside world—a definite place in it, of course—not only suggested how to write it but repudiated a way I had already tried. What follows has no claim to be critical analysis; it can be called a piece of hindsight from a working point of view.
    What changed my story was a trip. I was invited to drive with an acquaintance, one summer day, down south of New Orleans to see that country for the first (and so far, only) time; and when I got back home, full of the landscape I’d seen, I realized that without being aware of it at the time, I had treated the story to my ride, and it had come into my head in an altogether new form. I set to work and wrote the new version from scratch.
    As first written, the story told, in subjective terms, of a girl in a claustrophobic predicament: she was caught fast in the over-familiar, monotonous life of her small town, andimmobilized further by a prolonged and hopeless love affair; she could see no way out. As a result of my ride, I extricated—not the girl, but the story.
    This character had been well sealed inside her world, by nature and circumstance, just where I’d put her. But she was sealed in to the detriment of the story, because I’d made hers the point of view. The primary step now was getting outside her mind; on that instant I made her a girl from the Middle West. (She’d been before what I knew best, a Southerner.) I kept outside her by taking glimpses of her through the eyes of a total stranger: casting off the half-dozen familiars the first girl had around her, I invented a