A proposition: there are three parts to every story, and they are called the Pointless, What-Happened, and the Ineluctable.

The Pointless isn’t always really pointless, but it is quotidian, and often beside the point. There’s a reason that you don’t see people in movies sitting on the toilet, even though in the course of a narrative day a given character will surely have one or more episodes of it. If you’re telling about a year, zero of the twelve times the light bill gets paid will be necessary to moving the plot forward, in all probability.

What-Happened is what happened. She said, and then he said. The miles rolled by and then suddenly they were rolling over the bridge from Arkansas into Memphis on bald tires in a 1963 Buick. Hemingway was famous for advising writers to stay right here, to simply present the facts as they unfold, without trying to explain the feelings or embellish in any way.

Ineluctable is the Unexplainable, which you also don’t try to explain, but rather point to, via the vehicle of what happens, and that which isn’t explained, or doesn’t have to be, is what makes a story literary.

A long time ago I was reading Michener on the Settling of the American West. You follow a family day after day, getting to know them, and at some point in half a sentence the wife just gets bit by a snake and dies.

All the reader gets is What-Happened–boom like that.

But the ineluctable is touched briefly. Mortality happens. No woman knows the day or hour. The survivors are left to carry on, and this is the human condition.

One day the shed will be built at last. One day, by some mechanism, the money will begin to flow again.