“And Then One Day” — A Writing Exercise Combining Scene and Summary

By Mary Jones

I wrote the essay “The Father” unusually fast, on the “Notes” feature on my phone, and it has not changed much, if at all, from my earliest draft. The shortest story in The Goodbye Process: Stories, it is also the only story in the collection that is fully nonfiction. (It was originally published as an essay in Brevity.)

I don’t usually write fast. Most of my stories are composed over the course of years and usually require many drafts before they are complete. “The Father...