We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy.

Marya was created unhappy and lonely and has become more specifically unhappy and lonely with every passing page. That is the energy the story has made, and must use. We want what she wants: for her not to be so lonely. The energy of the story is being stored in our hope that she’ll find some relief.

Chekhov, in the first few pages, built a door and indicated that he wanted us to go through it. Over that door is a sign: “Hanov Might Assuage Marya’s Loneliness.” Every time we’ve felt Marya’s loneliness, we’ve glanced hopefully over at that door.

Now that door has been shut and locked. Or, actually, it’s vanished. Chekhov has, with Hanov’s exit, denied himself the obvious, expected source of resolution. Who knows how Chekhov arrived at this decision, practically speaking, but we can observe what he did: he got rid of Hanov. Now there’s no danger that the story will take that easy route.

This is an important storytelling move we might call ritual banality avoidance. If we deny ourselves the crappo version of our story, a better version will (we aspirationally assume) present itself. To refuse to do the crappo thing is to strike a de facto blow for quality. (If nothing else, at least we haven’t done that.)

Chekhov already “has” the benefit of our expectation of a romantic development between Marya and Hanov. We’ve already pre-imagined that development. So he doesn’t have to go there. He can go past it, to whatever the next and presumably more sophisticated solution turns out to be (he can force his own hand, so to speak), just by taking Hanov out of the story.

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.”

George Saunders, Swim In Pond In Rain

It’s not a scientific process, but mine is not a scientific field. One would not expect Joyce to write utilizing the statistical method.

Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

She was found and lost to me almost at the same moment. I never existed for her, and never would, and she ended up only a sort of cross-thread in my life—marking a moment—though with a thread that is strong, and durable, like in that rough ribbon you have here with ridges and gaps alternating, called grosgrain, where the weft is even thicker than the warp.

Karl Deisseroth, Projections

Outside Dante’s tomb, there is an artist who draws the anatomy of angels. Her pencil illustrations show the hollow bones protruding from the spines of seraphs exactly the same way the ulna and radius of a bird’s wing appear, with the feathers radiating out like fingers.

To see the precision of these drawings in the context of medical illustrations brings angels back to Earth as creatures of flesh and bones. Biology.

It is a tweak of perception, a suspension of disbelief, that renders angels as real, much more than a puff of hope hovering over us in times of need.

Terry Tempest Williams,
Finding Beauty In Broken World