Cathy and I got some great bargains at Kroger today. Oak milk, two cartons for four dollars; quarts of vegan ice cream, buy one, get one free. Sometimes it takes so little to delight us. Thank goodness for the upright freezer in our basement.

So that’s it. That’s the end of the story. It isn’t even a story, really. It’s more of an anecdote: We went to Kroger. We bought oat milk and vegan ice cream. Then we went home. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. It isn’t even worth my time telling or your time reading. It’s a collection of statements that disappear as soon as they’re uttered.

Stories, as we know, are worth telling because they’re about days (or moments) unlike the regular come-and-go. They merit telling and reading because they’re heading somewhere valuable. Without them some truth of human behavior would be lost to us forever. We have to ask, “Where’s the rub, the friction, that makes a story worth telling? We might even add Faulkner’s comment about stories being about the human heart in conflict with itself.

I’m teaching Raymond Carver’s story, “A Small, Good Thing,” this week. The story opens, as you may recall, with a mother going to a bakery and ordering a cake for her son’s birthday. If we stop there, we don’t have a story. It takes what happens next to propel the narrative toward what Faulkner called “the old verities and truths of the heart.” The birthday boy gets hit by a car on his way to school. At first, he seems to be okay, merely dazed. He’s able to walk back to his house where, as he’s telling his mother what happened, he loses consciousness. What follows is a stretch of days unlike any others. The birthday cake that the mother ordered becomes so much more than a mere object. I won’t ruin the story by telling you the role the baker plays, but trust me, it’s significant.

So an object might bring one who possesses it delight, but that won’t make a story. We need the friction of a complication.

Imagine, then, that one of your characters has gone to a yard sale where they’ve purchased a particular object. What might that object be? Don’t settle for the predictable items one might find at such a sale; be sure to include the extraordinary. In mapping out a story, what will happen next because of your character’s purchase? What wrinkle will appear? I’m being deliberately vague with possible examples because I want your imagination to run wild. The key is to quickly introduce some sort of complication that changes the way the main character looks at the object they’ve just acquired with the hope that this will begin a chain of narrative events that will take us to the truths of the heart that Faulkner mentioned.