If I were to wonder, for example, what might happen next in the story I’d begun about the painter who was having trouble finishing a particular painting, and who’d stopped in at the studio of a friend who was also a painter, to distract herself and to clear her mind, so that now she was passing some time with that friend, as well as with a woman who was a neighbor of the friend (and who the two of them had encountered on the sidewalk outside, walking her dog, when they themselves were returning from the store to which they’d gone to buy the alcohol that they would stir into the drinks they would make), I might allow a conversation between the three women to unfold, though what that conversation might be about I would not initially know, though in time I would come to know it, and perhaps even encourage it to follow one trajectory as opposed to another, insofar as I, in my capacity as author, would want to discover, at the same time as my characters would, or in the imminence that would precede their discovery of it (if indeed they would discover it at all), that which motivates them to utter what they will utter, and to do what they will do.