Since Cathy’s cancer diagnosis, we’ve been lifted by so many kindnesses, both large and small, from people all over the world. Maybe it’s a sign that we’ve done something right to bank so much love. Even if we haven’t had time to respond to your encouraging messages, please know we feel the connection with each one of you.

This journey we’re on has reminded us of how many good people there are in the world, and how there’s this network of those who wish the best for others. It’s more than heartening to know; when you’re in a situation like we are now, it’s vital.

This all has me thinking of the way good narratives depend not only on action but also on connections and disconnections. I offer this observation for those of you who may be stuck on a story you’re trying to tell. Here are some questions you might ask to help you move the story along with a deeper resonance. Who are your main characters and how are their actions the result of a desire to form a connection with someone else? How is the narrative driven by this desire and complicated as well? How can you use connection and disconnection to move the plot along? If you think about stories from your own lives, I bet you’ll be able to see the things that happened as movements in your relationships with others. Sometimes we connect, sometimes a connection is altered or even severed, sometimes we form new connections.

In Sherwood Anderson’s story, “The Untold Lie,” from Winesburg, Ohio, two farm hands are husking corn in a field at dusk. Suddenly the younger man confesses that he’s “got Nell Gunther in trouble.” He asks the older man for advice: “I know what everyone would say is the right thing to do, but what do you say?” This is the moment that illuminates the human, a moment that dissolves the distance between the two men. This confession—this request for advice—entangles them. Anderson writes, “There they stood in the big empty field with the quiet corn shocks standing in rows behind them and the red and yellow hills in the distance, and from being just two indifferent workmen they had become all alive to each other.”

All alive to each other. Isn’t that what each of us is trying to do when we write? To find the moment in a narrative when one character’s world becomes vital to another character? Aren’t we trying to form connections between characters and between ourselves and our readers? Aren’t we trying to say, “Here’s a life. Could it, please, for at least a time, be your life, too?”

At some point, we all need to add the human tale to our writing by being interested in what the action of a narrative means to the characters involved. They had become all alive to each other. Especially these days, I can think of no more powerful words, vulnerable in their naked honesty, than those. Much love to all of you from Cathy and me.