We who write fiction have no team of actors or musicians to do our bidding, so it’s easy to forget that our work, too, has a composition stage and a performance stage. We are both composer and performer. Or rather, we are both storyteller and writer. The actual writing of the story, along with the creation of the text, the choice of words, the dialogue, the style, the tone, the point of view — that is the performance, that is the part of our work that earns us the title “writer.” The invention of the characters and situations and events, along with the construction of plot and scene, the
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