She crossed the room, intending to answer it.
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And she saw, when she looked into the room that the door opened onto, a table on which was a telephone that had started ringing.
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This one opened.
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She tried the other.
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It was locked.
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‘click-click, click-click’
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She tried one of them…
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The woman had stopped in front of two doors, neither of which she’d encountered before.
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And yet, in its highest form, fiction is an expression of truth.
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Not that, in the scheme of things, very much is at stake, for what I’m describing might be referred to as only a fiction.
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Or, anyway, to reconcile the novel to it.
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So that if I make a misstep, and move the drama in a direction I wish I hadn’t, I’ll have to admit to it, or find a way to reconcile it to the novel.
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It will proceed with each of my utterances, regardless of whether they are suited for that moment.
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I mean I know that, if the novel has begun, it doesn’t stop merely because I’d like for it to, or because I’m not sure what to say next.
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I ask that question as part of the diary, though I know it must be part of the novel as well.
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Had the house always been windowless? Or did the woman wake one morning to find that, in the night, something had happened to it, and now the windows were gone?
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So, ok. Once there was a woman who lived in a windowless house.
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This style, or effect, also described as ‘whatness’, is the genetic makeup of art, peculiar to each artist. Which is why, in revision, one can’t take something out or add something in, or change one thing to another, without causing reverberations; every element in a work of art must be born of the gesture that precedes it.
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Take this diary, for instance. It contains a variety of expressions. But it succeeds as a work of art only insofar as those expressions have a unity of style, or effect.