Which isn’t to say that the selection and sequencing of events in fiction aren’t important, or that their thematic implications are not consequential, but that for a writer to attend to them, or to worry about them overly, before that writer has begun to recognize that language is a medium (like clay for a sculptor, or paint for a painter), the manipulation of which must be consciously and uniquely achieved, is to reduce the art of fiction to its conventions, and to close off the valves of its potential.