Fiction and storytelling — craft fundamentals

The fundamentals of fiction are not rules but orientations — ways of attending to character, time, causality, and consequence that make a story feel inevitable in retrospect, even though at every moment it could have gone elsewhere. The craft is learned not by mastering techniques in sequence but by reading fiction that moves you and asking, with full seriousness, why. To understand what a story does is to begin to understand what you might ask your own stories to do.