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It doesn’t work to just say what happened. Even though the thing that happened presumably is this huge thrilling terrifying thing, you have to be mindful of the point where it stops being your story and becomes the story’ story. If you’re intent on holding it to the facts, you will miss that point. I recently contributed an essay to a book in which twenty-some fiction writers and critics were asked to write about a movie that had changed their lives. In this essay we were instructed to be very personal, so for the first time I wrote about things I’d written about in my short stories as true autobiography: this is what happened. I found it really unnerving and not as interesting as the bits that had formed composites in the stories.

Some time ago we received a letter from Philip K. Dick, one of the most highly regarded contemporary authors of fantasy and science fiction. In it, Mr. Dick claimed to have been profoundly influenced by a story in the Missouri Review, the reading of which, he said, put him back on the track of a kind of writing that he felt he had abandoned in the pursuit of high remuneration.