Point no point

Point No Point, BC

There are many things that must be locked away from the room where we write. ... [C]hief among them is a point to be made -- even when that point has kept us up all night, fired our emotions, made us both angry and sad, indignant and afraid.

"Remember," Flannery O'Connor said, 

that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character. ... When you have a character he will create his own situation and his situation will suggest some kind of resolution as you get into it. Wouldn't it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning, because the meaning is in you.

"Writing fiction," Eudora Welty wrote,

places the novelist and the crusader on opposite sides. ... We cannot in fiction set people to acting mechanically or carrying placards to make their sentiments plain. People are not Right and Wrong, Good and Bad, Black and White personified; flesh and blood and the sense of comedy object.

-- Alice McDermott, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction 

 

The heart of the story

 So, one way to approach a story -- to evaluate how good it is, how graceful and efficient -- is to ask, "What is the heart of you, dear story?" (Or, channeling Dr. Seuss, "Why are you bothering telling me this?")

That is: "When all is said and done, what do you claim to live by, story? I need to know this so that I can see how well your non-normative aspects are serving the heart of you."

-- George Saunders, "The Heart of the Story," from A Swim in the Pond in the Rain