“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

“The fact that erotic attraction in Austen’s work is forced out of language—sublimated into ambiguous gestures and looks and seemingly innocuous speech acts—constitutes in very large part the drama of her narratives. In a sense, then, it is from the unavailability of language that the tensions of the novel arise. We might propose the novel as a kind of book in which the most important subject cannot be spoken about. The genius of Jane Austen’s technical achievement is apparent not only in her wide readership but in her formal legacy. Austen’s narrative structures, her command of pacing, her perspectival techniques, her staging of small knowable social worlds: these are the basic ingredients of what we would now call the novel as a form.”

If you know where a story is going, don’t hoard it. Make the story go there, now. But then what? What will you do next? You’ve surrendered your big reveal. Exactly. Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we don’t have anything else. And this can be a form of trickery. Surrendering that thing is a leap of faith that forces the story to attention, saying to it, in effect, “You have to do better than that, and now that I’ve denied you your trick, your first-order solution, I know that you will.”