conversation is an engine

Good story always depends on silent remembered chunks

Athey was a storyteller too, as it took me some while to find out, for he never told all of any story at the same time. He told them in odd little bits and pieces, usually in unacknowledged reference to a larger story that he did not tell because (apparently) he assumed you already knew it, and he told the fragment just to remind you of the rest. Sometimes you couldn’t even assume that he assumed you were listening: he might have been telling it to himself. With Athey you were always somewhere in the middle of the story. He would just start talking wherever he started remembering.

           (Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry. Beginning of Chapter 21)

That’s why Hemingway wrote and then returned to remove as much text as possible to make the story as spare as possible:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

(Hemingway’s self-proclaimed best work)

Our minds need to leap and grasp their way through a narrative to fully engage.

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