At the end of Katherine Mansfield’s story, “The Garden Party,” a young girl, Laura, tries to explain to her brother, Laurie, what she’s just experienced. After an extravagant garden party at Laura’s home, her mother sends her down the hill with a basket of leftover food for the family of a young workingman who that very day died in a tragic accident. Laura, who’d been sympathetic when news of the death arrived just before the party—so much so, she told her mother they shouldn’t have the party at all—now has room for only fond feelings about the party: “And it seemed to her that kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her. She had no room for anything else.”

At the home of the dead man, she’s invited and gently coerced into viewing his body. She takes note of how peacefully he seems to be sleeping, but she’s also aware of the reality of his life having ended: “Never wake him up again. . . .What did garden parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful.”

Walking back to her house, she meets Laurie who’s come to check on her. He asks her, “Was it awful?” She tells him, “It was simply marvelous.” Then she tries to express her feelings: “Isn’t life,” she stammered, “isn’t life—” But what life was she couldn’t explain.

Exactly. What she’s just experienced—the contrast between the gaiety of the party and the somber grief in the young man’s house, as well as the beauty of his corpse amidst the sadness—has led to this undefinable juxtaposition of life and death. How do we explain all that? How do we say what life is?

We don’t, and Mansfield doesn’t. She lets the contrasts in the story settle in Laura as she must make room for them before she can find words for what she may or may not be able to articulate one day beyond the final page of the story—those eternal mysteries of our living.

Often, at the ends of our first drafts, we try to do too much. We try to make sure our readers get the point of the story. This approach almost always goes awry. As Mansfield illustrates, it’s better to embrace the unknowable, to let it arise organically from the details of the story. If we can simplify the plot, we can intensify the emotional impact of small but significant moments. When Laura looks upon the body of the young man, something changes for her, something for which she has no words. Sometimes that’s what stories do. They dramatize rather than explain, If we could explain a story, we wouldn’t need it. We’d simply need the explanatory statement, but some things are so complicated there is no explanation. That’s when we need the dramatization of characters in circumstances that end up affecting them deeply, so deeply all we need do is let them and the readers feel.