The conjured world …

… Boston College Magazine � Fall 2014 � Features � Astonished by love. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It’s a simple enough formula (miraculous in its simplicity, when you stop to think about it): The writer—in the silence of her composing room—puts her mind, her language, her experience, her aspirations and observations, even her own will, at the service of her narrator. The narrator speaks and creates a world. The reader, in turn, lends his inner voice, the voice with which he speaks to himself, to the narrator, and thus that created world comes into vivid existence. Eliminate one part of this particular trinity and the novel—the story, the poem, literature itself—disappears.