STORY

  
Once we have told a story about death, we have transcended death. Once we have arranged the chaos of our experience into a narrative structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end, we have changed chaos into cosmos. Fiction writers believe, whether they choose to make this belief explicit or not, that the deepest secret of existence is not the fault that divides but the order that unifies. The opposite of fault, which is apparent, is not virtue, but faith, which is not.

The unity is what the fiction writer goes down into the dark hole for. The word for the unifying structure he or she comes up with, by the miracle of this process, is narrative, which we also call story, what we know as the work, the creation, the vision, but what the writer always regards as the gift.

The great moral problem of our age -- as it has been every age -- is the human being's constitutional inability to perceive this unity. Without a felt experience of the unity of one's own life -- how its beginning leads to the middle which leads to its end -- one lacks a sense of selfhood.

-- James Carroll, "The Virtue of Writing"